unknownfate

I have never understood those restocking videos where people unpack all their stuff to put it in clear plastic containers. Stuff already comes in containers!

But thanks to this year's unusual amount of mice, I get it now.

Every year when it gets cold, I have a few mice try their luck inside. It's not a big deal. I have traps and after catching two or three, that's usually it. This year has been something else. I'm finding mice in places they have never been before. Or at least finding signs of them.

They chewed the bottom out of the trash bag, they got into the flour, sugar, and butter, and left signs of their presence all over. So now I get it. I have purchased clear plastic containers to put stuff in to keep the mice out of it. Aesthetic be damned, the little buggers aren't getting into the rice again.

I don't know if I ever posted about it before, but I recently stumbled over an old half-idea I had after watching the first Hobbit movie.

What if a zombie virus broke out down in the depths of Erebor? There were so many dwarves, and they were all so scattered throughout the mountain that how long would it take before any of them noticed? How far would it spread before they understood? The people of Dale probably wouldn't know until either the survivors managed to escape and warn them, or the dwarves stopped coming entirely and some plucky humans decided to go see what had happened.

Imagine the dark and elaborate halls crawling with zombie dwarves. If they had succumbed with their armor on, how hard would they be to kill?

This brings us to the dragon. Smaug would be a hero if he purged the mountain of the virus, even if that isn't why he came. Maybe the elves were the ones that called him in. Extra betrayal there. But he could flamethrower his way and just torch the halls until all sounds of movement finally stopped.

Anyway, just a thought that led to several more thoughts.

So it's awhile till spring, but I'm already thinking about the flower bed. It had some day lilies left from the last tenant, and last year, I dressed it up with four more plants and a concrete turtle.

Well, just before Mother's Day, the turtle disappeared. I know someone carried it off, because again, concrete. The day after, three of my four plants disappeared too. Just holes in the ground where I had planted them.

All I could figure was that someone had been hard up for a Mother's day present. The question is how to go forward?

My first thought was to spring for bigger, heavier statuary. Life-size creatures. Bears. Buffalo. Boar. Y'know, something that it would need a whole team of people to lug off in the middle of the night. My dear friend was nothing but supportive and all for my yard looking like the White Queen's courtyard in Narnia. But that gave me a new idea.

Forget the White Queen, I should recreate Medusa's courtyard. I need me some life-size concrete humans in poses of fear to scatter around. One that looks like it was trying to run off with a potted plant.(I'll put an actual plant in for realism.) One cowering beside the birdbath. All with anguished expressions and tormented postures. Make trespassing a little more interesting in these parts.

The neighbors may not like it, but I'm not especially fond of their wind chime forest either.

Both my parents were teachers in West Virginia and if I remember right, the only state that paid teachers less at that time was Mississippi. Money was tight. We also lived too far off the beaten path to get cable even if we could afford it. We had our one little channel (NBC) and a vcr. We also had access to the county board office's media library.

It was full of educational or education adjacent movies. We watched a lot of them. And for some reason, today I found myself remembering a British period drama we watched all those decades ago. Well, just one scene anyway.

The two British soldiers had been captured and imprisoned and then taken to a hilltop to be killed by firing squad. They held hands as they went to their deaths and I remember being struck by that, that these two brave people could be so calm in the face of their executions, but still reaching out for each other. Again, this was rural West Virginia where you only took your hands out of your pockets for immediate family. My little sister asked why they were doing that, and my mother, already weepy behind her kleenex, said that it was to comfort each other. Then, we all cried.

That is the only part of that movie I remember. I don't remember the name or any other part of the story, whether the soldiers knew each before or had only met in prison. I have that one scene, of them walking up the hill at gunpoint, holding hands. I'm pretty sure they were killed but I don't remember that part clearly. Random memory strikes again.

Ok. So last night's dream started out in the Brave universe with a lot of cartoon Scottish people running around. I think David Tennant was there trying to get some big machine to work. There was also the cast of Time Bandits, now Pixar-animated as well, doing a theater group type rock opera version of Game of Thrones. There were many sexy dances. It was surprisingly good.

That somehow bled into a huge video game apocalypse where we had to run around and find vehicles and weapons and figure out who to shoot. There was Simon Farnaby from Horrible Histories playing Chris Hemsworth (also surprisingly well) and I managed to make a sweet little cartoon girl morph into the next Boss villain because I threw a grenade into a crowd of mostly enemies and accidentally took out someone who had been kind to her before. Whoops.

Meanwhile, the Time Bandits were doing a Rihanna style song about the fate of Khal Drogo. That's all I remember for sure.

I haven't been keeping a journal lately because I don't want to record or remember how I felt these days.

But maybe the miseries would be less profound if I did or found something.

So there was a small lightning storm this morning. Thunder and lightning before the sun came up. I smiled in spite of myself.

I've never made a character mood board but the urge is there.

( Day 24 )