I'm sorry we haven't updated in a while. You may think it's because nothing whatever has happened to us, and therefore we have better manners than to create time-wasting posts chronicling our navel lint. You would be wrong. We would dearly LOVE the leisure to contemplate in electronic writing the nature, texture, color and volume of our navel lint, but we have no such leisure. Instead, we (meaning I) wrote a novel in November, which is also my busiest month at work. I'm a glutton for punishment.
But that's not to say that nothing was happening on the home front.
In fact, remember that fabulous plan we had way back when? That plan to catch a rat and stick it and our dogs into the old cold frame and have them to epic battle? Yeah, that plan.
Well, meet the rat.
No, we didn't give it a cutesy name - it's a RAT, for pity's sake! The Pirate found it in the trap on the morning of the 2nd and we brought it upstairs and admired it for a while.
We put it down on the floor and tried to get the dogs to evince some interest.
We put the cage on the floor and Esme was briefly alarmed at it. And then she cuddled back up in her bed and forgot all about it.
The rat spent all that day and night in the cage inside the deep utility sink in our laundry room. We had no idea what to do with him. I mean, it's one thing to plan an epic battle in a sort of abstract way, it's another to have the two opponents in the same room determinedly NOT LOOKING AT EACH OTHER.
By the second day, the rat was looking a little peaked. It might have been fear, it might have been desperation, it might have been because we hadn't given him any food or water - there was no way to without letting him out of the cage, and none of us was in the mood to get bitten.
The Pirate decided that the time for the battle had come. He put the puppies on inside the cold frame, and we put the glass top on it so that we could cheer on the action, but the participants couldn't opt out early. And then I opened the trap and tipped the rat in.
At first the rat just sort of hunkered down in the thick crush of leaves covering the bottom of the cold frame. The dogs, being puppies, were sort of excited because they could hear the rat. Shortly after hitting the ground, though, the rat began shrieking. For a rat, shrieking is a tiny thing. I'm sure that you can completely imagine the sound of a rat yelling at the top of its tiny shrill lungs. But there's precious little emotion carried by that noise. Was the rat terrified? Likely. Was she angry? Just as likely. Was she trying to intimidate the dogs with her fierce battle cry? Another good option. I don't pretend to know anything about animal psychology AT ALL.
The puppies would charge at the rat - they were doing a good job of teaming up with one flushing the rat out of the leaves and the other standing over it. The rat, in turn, would leap at the puppies, baring its teeth and squeaking ferociously. The picture was taken through a filthy pane of glass, but the rat is in the upper right-hand corner in the act of leaping at Dagmar.
The dogs were both pretty aggressive toward the rat, but in different ways. Esme seemed a little more brave than Dagmar, although she did wimp out sooner. By the end, the rat had buried itself deep in a corner and the dogs just got bored. There wasn't enough "chase" for them to stay interested, unfortunately. We need to work on that.
So, although Burns spoke for his own race, he did not speak for all. The best laid plans o' mice gang ne'er agley.
Okay, that's not entirely true either. While the puppies did not quickly and efficiently dispatch the rat as intended, it was not allowed to go home victorious to its many thousands of children saying "Those namby-pamby dogs are nothing to be afraid of! We could dance on their noses with both arms full of groceries and they'd just lie there!"
It was actually dispatched with a shovel. So, THAT plan succeeded.
Men =1
Mice = infinity -1
