How many mice can live in a treadmill?

Posted on June 8, 2010 by lambrite

Yes, as a correction to this weekend’s post, mice, not mouse.  And yes, living, or at least hanging out, in the treadmill.   Which hasn’t been used in months…

So far, we are up to 4 catch-and-release mice.  Our friend with the cornsnake will be sorely disappointed that we’ve released them, but I couldn’t bring myself to condeming them to be dinner.

They are tiny critters – about 2 inches long, except for the baby (!#!#@$@#) which was too small to set off the but startled DH in the bathroom and was caught, nonetheless.  Babies… how many babies do mice have a time??  How long will we be catching these guys?  How gross is it that I had no idea we had so many?

Update:
I think we are up to 6, now.  DH bet on 12, total, and I am inclined to agree.  From wikipedia:

The gestation period is about 19–21 days, and they give birth to a litter of 3-14 young (average 6-8). One female can have some 5-10 litters per year.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we have only had one round of babies while we weren’t paying attention…

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a productive weekend

Posted on June 5, 2010 by lambrite

Since getting off work yesterday at 12:00, I have gone to 3 grocery stores, bought groceries for 1 week, cooked dinner, twice, and cooked and vacuum packed lunches for 6, yes 6, days.  I feel totally productive.  After tomorrow’s trip to New Orleans, I have dinner recipes, and then don’t expect me to cook again for at least 2 weeks.

Yesterday, we stared with Grilled Chicken Quesadillas – chicken with  rub of chipotle, garlic,onion, cumin and some other stuff (fantastic!) and grilled zucchini and corn.  It’s the corn that’s the killer for me; I can’t resist it.  They were surprisingly good, even though I added a heavy dose of tomatoes and cilantro, and I have 1 left over for lunch this week.   After, I finished the last pattern repeat on my socks and got too few (read 10) hours sleep – still catching up on NETC, you think? – and got up to start over again.

Today, 18 vegetable fritters, tandoori shrimp, 6 weekday lunches, 3 loads of dishes, 1 mouse, and 2 socks make this a completely productive weekend and I should be granted tomorrow off.

Mouse, yes that’s right.  We have had one for a few weeks (months?) now, and been uncertain what to do.  DH found a humane trap on Amazon, so I baited it last night, and we have, voila, 1 mighty mouse!  DH took it out this a.m. to release it to the wild, but the scrabbling in the treadmill tells me we have more than one… Oh, the trauma….

So, we’ll bait again tonight and see.  (Bait = peanut butter on a cracker + dog food, for all you animal rights activists out there!)  I’d like my dining room back to myself, please.

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Still finding the magic…

Posted on May 30, 2010 by lambrite

NETC was a really good conference this year.  Hat’s off to Auburn, who, if I paid attention to sports, might be an arch-enemy.  In my sinus-induced fog, I have, at the moment, no really reflective thoughts from the sessions I went to.  But the one that wins my favorite, most exciting vote, is definitely the one that showed showed how to create a smartboard for < $50 using a WII remote.  Now, Ohio admitted quite openly that this came directly from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s5EvhHy7eQ.  Nevertheless, seeing it in action was sooooo cool.  Occasionally, I find the magic in life, and this was definitely one occasion…  Just the weekend before this conference, the DH and I were talking about how I prefer to think on a whiteboard than in my head, except that the whiteboard is never big enough.  Well, IdeaPaint makes whiteboard paint, but it’s insanely expensive.  This, though, is cheap, gets to play with fire (initially), and has as much square footage as you could possibly want, if you take screen captures or save your image files…

If I put one together for my office, I’ll be sure to share, but imagine the possibilities in a schoolroom!  World maps projected on the floor, with kids drawing the boundaries… interactive games to do, I don’t know what, I don’t remember school, but the possibilities are so exciting!  Definitely a magic moment, for me.

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Asking for trouble…

Posted on May 19, 2010 by lambrite

So, after 5 years working at the AgCenter, I may get to do what I wanted to when I started.  In all actuality, I had even forgotten that I had this goal, this vision, after being caught up in the mire of day-to-day, unimportant nonsense.

When I started, I wanted to pull all of our many client applications into one do-it-all application (read: CRM).  Gee, don’t ya know, there are softwares for that!  Well, I don’t think I ever intended to really write something like that; that’s not a one-person, one-year project.  Neither is this, but it’s a lot closer.

We’ve been evaluating Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  It’s exciting.  I hope it’s not exciting like SharePoint – sounding terribly fantastic until you actually have to do something real-world – but it seems kosher so far.  I am so disenchanted with SharePoint…

I realize I’m just begging for grey hairs and a heart attack, but I am really excited about the prospect of implementing something like this.  Extension is nothing like sales, so, while the out-of-the-box configuration is lovely, it isn’t at all useful.  Which means, of course, that I get to reinvent it all, imposing order on chaos.  (Hmm, could this be one of my favorite things to get paid for?)  Tomorrow I’ll have an idea of whether or not the project will move forward.  Microsoft is freaking expensive, but the things you can do… oh, the many things!

I’m such a geek at heart.

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