[onetwo_threefour]

Okay, I know this is supposed to be about other threads, but the blimp story forces me to post this and it's not that long.

About ten years ago, when I was in first year of law school, my wife and I lived in a basement suite in Montgomery. At first it was okay, even though we somehow both failed to notice that the suite didn't have a bathtub (although we both swore up and down that we'd remembered seeing one), nor any closet space except for about a four foot wide closet in a hallway down from the bedroom.

It was actually okay for about six months or so until we got some new upstairs neighbours who were absolute idiots. Besides playing Mambo #5 incessantly, and doping up the whole house every weekend, they had a couple of half-wild farm dogs that used to attack our dogs when we let them out in the back yard to play.

So far, we're living with all this, then in the late winter, we suddenly start to hear strange noises coming from above the suspended ceiling panels in the lower part of our unit. (it was on two levels, the upper was originally an attached garage converted into living room and kitchen, the lower was the original basement with two tiny bedrooms, a bathroom and a laundry room that regularly flooded from the outside whenever it rained.)

The noises were scitchy-scratchy noises and one day I stuck my head up in the ceiling to find myself staring at a mouse running by with a dog kibble in it's mouth. Now, we've always kept our dogfood in sealed cans, so we knew that it must be the upstairs neighbours leaving the food out where vermin could get at it, which was no surprise because they were complete slobs...

Anyway, that is really the prelude to the story, we put mouse traps in the ceiling, complained to the landlord, and hoped everything would sort itself out. That's when the fun really started. We'd catch a mouse or two a day, but at night we'd constantly be hearing these scratching and chewing sounds, and the pattering of mouse feet running back and forth across the ceiling in our bedroom. You'd try to sleep, but you couldn't help hearing it and imagining what they were doiing up there.

So anyway, after a couple of weeks of this, one night I'm lying in bed at about 4 AM and there a g-damn mouse scratching and chewing literally over my head for like half an hour, and I'm going batsh-t crazy with it. So I decided to do somthing to try and scare it away. I reached over on to my crappy little nightstand and grabbed an eraser that was sitting there from having been doing some reviewing and notes before bed for class the next day. It was a pretty new eraser, one of those nice white rectangular gum erasers about 1"X3" and with a good bit of heft.

Now, before I continue, in my defence, I had been sleeping badly for two weeks and 4 AM is not a good time to plan a mouse offensive. I thought that if I whipped the eraser at roughly the spot on the ceiling where I could hear the little bast--d, I could scare the living s--t out of it and make it run away so I could get some sleep. But there was a fatal flaw in my plan... my wife was soundly sleeping beside me with no forewarning of what I was about to do. So I laid on my back at the edge of the bed so I could get a good arm-swing going for a throw and hucked that eraser at the ceiling as hard as I could. To some degree the plan worked. There was a sharp thwap and thud as the eraser hit the ceiling panel, popped it up, and it fell back into place. The scurrying mouse feet immediately bolted. However, i had no time to enjoy my success because, almost simultaneously, my wife woke up screaming like she was being murdered.

It turns out that I had failed to take simple physics and psychology into account, in particluar the law of gravity and the knowledge that both my wife and i shared that we had been living under a family of mice for some time. When I threw the eraser up, it came back down, and landed on my wife's forehead, then bounced off into her hair. She awoke to the feeling of the eraser hitting her just after a loud noise from the ceiling immediately above her and instinctively knew that a mouse had just fallen on her face from the ceiling and was in her hair. She went from prone to vertical faster than fotze in a thread about sausage and was jumping up and down on the bed trying to get the 'mouse' out of her hair.

At that point I made the cardinal error and started laughing out loud. I got a look of death, and it took her about tewnty minutes to calm down. Now it's one of our funny 'poor student stories' but I thought I was a dead man for about thirty seconds when she saw me laughing...