EEK! A mouse!

So there is at least one way in which this summer is preparing me for the new apartment in Chicago - there are mice in the office. My first day, Jessica pointed to a room and said, "And that's where the mice live." I definitely thought she was kidding, but sure enough, I saw a littttle mouse running around the office. It was all I could do to not squeal (I'm not a squealer, but there's some universal reaction that happens when you see a little rodent scuttering underfoot), but sure enough, others had seen it as well.

Let me say at this point that I'm beginning to realize my office is full of ridiculous young men. Even in another language I can tell that they have a ball goofing around with each other, when they aren't working extremely hard. It's the best work environment I've ever been in.

Ok, back to the mice. Two guys who had seen the mouse were now determined to catch it. Have you ever tried to cup a spider? You flip the cup upside down ontop of it, slide paper underneath, and release the spider out the window. Well, Marius and Michiel did this with the mouse. Except of course you can't use a cup because it's far too large and fast. So they used a trash can. Not a huge one, but certainly too large for a piece of paper, so they got a cardboard box and *successfully* "cupped" the mouse. Michiel looked crazy, but he took this mouse in a garbage pail all the way down to the street and released it in our neighbor's alleyway. He came back up to the office looking triumphant, until about an hour later when we saw another mouse. They didn't go through the ordeal again, so I sat with my feet off the floor the rest of the afternoon.

Marius was bragging that the mouse was lucky Michiel caught it, or else he would have kicked it out the window, to which Michiel replied, "No, you're not a killer." It made me think of the conversation at the Wick table a few weeks ago, during which we debated the terminal velocity of a mouse, and at what height it would need to be dropped to actually die on impact, or if it would die at all, since it's body weight is so low. I kept these thoughts to myself in the office this afternoon.

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I went to a concert in the Haagse Bosjes tonight, to listen to the BigBand Youth Orchestra play "I Feel Good" by James Brown, sung by a blond teenage Dutch girl. Not quite the real deal. I was freezing afterwards (quite cold outside) so I decided to go for a bike ride to explore the city some more. I succeeded in finding the bad parts of town, including the RedLight district. Glad I've got that neighborhood covered, now. I got home safely, and now I'm off to bed. Good day, overall.