Before and After

In my next life, I'm going to have thick hair, good teeth and a kitchen with storage space. I laugh when I see these HGTV shows like House Hunters and the people are looking at a kitchen the size of my living room and say it's "kind of small." You want to see small? Come to New York. I have no drawers in my kitchen, and two cabinets: one I use for food and one I use for dishes. I keep my limited pots and pans in the oven.

So it's all too easy to just put something on top of the refrigerator, and mine had gotten a bit out of hand. I had never seen a mouse up there, or almost more importantly, any evidence of one, but when I read all that mouse stuff on the Internet, it did say to get rid of any areas of clutter which makes sense.

I have to say the top of my refrigerator is one of the few vertical surfaces in my place that has clutter, but today I have one fewer.



BEFORE



AFTER

 Don't take the elapsed time as an indicator of how long this took. I snapped the first picture, then made a sandwich and read my book. I would say elapsed time of this project was under 10 minutes.

I did find some packaged food which had expired. One was a packet of taco seasoning that expired in September 2011. Hmmmm... guess I haven't had tacos in a while. This morning I was having some orange juice and there was about one more serving, and I wondered if I should dump it or save it since I'll be out of town all next week. I looked at the expiration date and it had expired three days ago. Actually I was glad I drank first, then looked since the OJ was perfectly fine. I'm not sure what exactly the "best used by" phrase means. How long until you really shouldn't drink it?

And to answer the recurring question, no mice, no evidence. I have left the glue trap out. When Ana was here on Thursday, she was telling me she is going to buy some more glue traps because... and this is the part I didn't understand... but I realized she was saying she found some droppings in a corner in my living room... she called it "cah-key" -- I'd heard of ca-ca, but not ca-kee. I don't know if that's Spanish, Spanish slang, her own slang or what. Of course, it could be old ca-kee or so I'm hoping.

As I have endlessly said, I'm sure to the point of boredom to those of you who patiently listen to my mouse tales, I have always thought my mice were passing through, not permanent residents. I got one who came, had her babies, her babies all died/were killed, she remined, she left and now she is either dead or in parts unknown. I am sure another one will come along at some point in the future, but I'm glad to be living alone for the time being.