I just spent the last half hour in solemn confrontation with a mouse in my kitchen. It began with a rustling on the counter; I ran into the kitchen in time to see him scurry behind the toaster oven. "I CAN SEE YOU!" I accused at high volume, to his great alarm, "YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT I CAN SEE YOU RIGHT NOW."

That is when I decided to video-conference D in for the rest of the mouse battle.

"Ok," I said to him, when he asked what was going on and what he was looking at, "I've trapped a mouse behind the toaster oven, using the Tardis cookie jar as a blockade. So unless this mouse is a Time Lord, there's no way he's getting away."

I think our mouse might be a Time Lord.

I also quickly came to regret bringing my own backseat mouse-trapper to the battlefield. D  kept asking why I wasn't using a box with a stick tied to a string, as I erected increasingly elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions.

Here's how the confrontation ended from D's POV:

D: "Why don't you fasten those two cookie racks together with a twistie tie?"

Sycorax Pine: "I don't know whether I have a twistie tie. Let me just see whether there's one in... AAAH!!!! AAAAH!!! AAAAAAAAAH!!!!!" The video feed shudders with in a clatter of baking tools and hideous screams.

D: "What's happening? What am I looking at? Why am I talking to our food processor now?"

SP: "I CAN SEE YOU! I CAN TOTALLY SEE YOU!"

D: "Where is he? What happened?"

SP: "Behind the dish drainer. Look, little friend, I just want to humanely trap you and take you outside so I don't have to call the exterminator to kill you. Can't we come to some sort of understanding?"

Mouse Time Lord: [!!!]

D: "I THOUGHT YOU HAD HIM TRAPPED. HOW DID HE GET OVER BY THE DISH RACK?"

SP: "Look, if you aren't in the trenches, you don't know what it's like."


Later...
SP: "Do you approve of the account of the mouse battle I posted online?"

D: "Yes, but you are still leaving out a crucial part of the story."

SP: "That I was outwitted by a mouse?"

D: "That the mouse didn't escape via a TIME MACHINE, but rather through a weakness in your defenses. It's like being a Time Lord, but even more like just walking through an open door."

I concede nothing. 


Farfara
October 27, 2012