There's a mouse about the house

When my brother and I were little, my parents read us an interactive book called "There's a mouse about the house!" by Richard Fowler.  It had a little mouse that slipped through slits in the pages, "moving from room to room".  It was actually a really cool book.  If only the reality of having mice were as cute as that book...

I have found four mice in my apartment since I have lived here.  Two dead, two alive.  Jordan Rippy, my friend and the previous tenant in this apartment never saw one.  Life is indeed not fair.

I realized that something afoot when I began to smell something really horrible in the apartment.  I don't really keep food or trash in the house, so I knew it wasn't something I did.

I also began to see these HUGE flies in my apartment; I believe they were a symptom of the mice problem.  Killing those flies was a pretty cool deal.  Sometimes I killed them with my bare hands, swatting in a matrix-like fashion.  Other times I killed them with a fly-swatter that amazingly turned into a Lightsaber.  Everything went into slow motion.  In those moments, I was Obi-Wan Kenobi.  Then I would see the dead flies on the keys of my piano and reality would set back in - there was still an unidentified smell in my apartment.

The smell intensified and eventually got so bad that I could not rest until I found its source.

The epicenter of the olfactory abomination was a dead mouse in a glue trap under my kitchen sink.  It looked like it had taken a mob hit, a gunshot wound straight to the head.

I removed the mouse and replaced the glue trap.  A one-time thing, I thought.  But no.

A few weeks later, I smelled the same smell, and I knew another mouse was among us.  One was.  Under the cabinets on the opposite side of the kitchen.  It was right before my mom came to visit.  She hates mice.  I thought she might cancel her trip if I told her, so I didn't mention it.

I told my landlord about all of this.  Her solution was to send me a device that emits a high frequency that repels mice.  She is a vegetarian and doesn't want the mice to die.  To that, I say, she doesn't have to eat the mice.

That device doesn't work, I learned, when one morning during my mom's visit (I'll write about that in a future post), I was going to leave to go get theatre tickets while she stayed to clean.  Before I left, I did one last mouse check to make her feel comfortable.

That's when I found the third one.

I told my mom, "gosh, it's crazy that I've seen three."

"THREE!" she said.

Right, remember I hadn't told her about the second one.  The cat was out of the bag.  Actually, the cat was nowhere to be found because if he were out of the bag, then I probably would not be seeing any mice.

I found the fourth mouse alive a few weeks later, right before Thanksgiving. It was in the loft of my apartment, "upstairs".

I finally called an exterminator to diagnose and fix the problem. His name is Roger, and he's from Jamaica. He determined that the mice were coming in through a hole upstairs between the wall and my air conditioning unit. So he plugged that hole with some steel wool. I haven't seen any mice or smelled any dead ones since then.

Anyway, it's been really funny, and I hope that humor has come across here.

Where New Yorkers Buy Christmas Trees

Have you ever wondered where New Yorkers buy their Christmas Trees?

You and I would go to a huge tent to buy our trees or maybe go cut them down at a Christmas tree farm, but in the great New York tradition of comical convenience, New York City folks buy them from Christmas Tree stands just down the block.

Last night, after taking the picture attached below, I went up to the operator of the stand to make sure it was alright with her that I took the picture.  She said it was alright, and I explained why I took the picture:  I wondered where New Yorkers bought Christmas trees and wanted to share the picture with people at home.  Her name is Brooke, and we agreed that I would buy a tree from her if I decided to buy one for my apartment.  She and her husband have set up their shop in my neighborhood for the Christmas tree selling season; they came all the way from California to sell trees.

I saw Brooke again yesterday evening as I was walking home from work.  We had a nice conversation a couple of blocks away from her establishment.  I'm glad she remembered me, and I'm looking forward to passing by her in the coming weeks.

Brooke's Christmas Tree Stand at the corner of 84th Street and Broadway
in the Upper West Side, just two blocks from my apartment.  

My new friend, Anne

In order to cool down after my late afternoon runs in Riverside Park down by the Hudson River, I usually exit the park and walk around the streets of the Upper West Side.  I never walk to same path twice and never have a plan about which path I am going to take.  I am convinced that the Lord leads me into those paths for specific reasons - like meeting my new friend, Anne.

Tonight after my run, I was walking around with my headphones in, and I came to the corner of 89th and Broadway.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an older lady flagging me down.  I stopped and greeted her. She asked me to help her across 89th street because "all of the curbs are beaten to shreds" (which is true, none of the curbs/ramps are in good shape).  She took my arm, and we began to walk.  

We crossed the street, and she said that she would just hold onto the scaffolding from that point on, but I insisted that I walk her all the way home (it was only one block more, not out of my way, and the scaffolding was going to end halfway down the block which would not have been good for her).  

So we continued to walk and I began to get to know this amazing, storied lady named Anne.  After asking me about my profession, she told me that she is a musician by profession; she plays the violin, viola, and all of the keyboard instruments.  She spent 15 years as the principal violist for the Frank Sinatra Orchestra and traveled all over the world with him.  They were friends! She was a player in the New York Philharmonic and was a family friend of Leonard Bernstein (whom she affectionately called "Lenny" as I'm sure his friends did).  She has played on the Tonight Show with Jack Parr and has played on David Letterman's show.  She knew those guys personally.  

When Anne gets bored, she looks at words and makes anagrams from them.  She once made 29 words from the word "philharmonic" in her head with no pencil or paper.  She recalled a time when one particular conductor she worked with conducted Mahler, "It was so boring; he had no heart for it.  Some people would dig their toes into the ground to keep from falling asleep.  I just did anagrams."

"I did my work, did my homework, I've traveled all over the world.  You know the only place I haven't been, the one place?  The North Pole, but I figure I can just go to Macy's to see Santa Clause" she said.  Anne is very witty and charming, and she "doesn't like old people."  She said, "I don't want to need help because I don't want to annoy people as much as they annoy me!"  She was awesome and hysterical.  

I took her all the way to the door of her building where her doorman helped her inside.  She said, "Well you know where I live and you're in the neighborhood, so if you ever want to stop by, just ask for Anne."  I said I would, and I think I will.  

Hurricane Sandy

If I were a non-author reader of this blog, then I would assume one of two things about my most recent one month-long publication sabbatical:  1) that my time in New York hasn't warranted any blog posts (i.e. it has been uneventful, "nothing to write home about" or 2) that my time in New York has warranted so many blog posts that I haven't had time to write them.  Thank goodness for both you and me, #2 is the truer of the hypothetical choices.  Indeed, my time here is exceeding my expectations in every way, and I am sorry that I have been lazy in communicating that to you.

If you could be in my work area every week (we call it the "bullpen", where the researchers sit), then you would sense the pressure that I feel to blog.  And I'm sure that if I were closer geographically to my Texas friends, I would feel a similar pressure.  Or maybe everyone is just messing with me.  I am finally responding to that pressure, whether real or imagined.

You probably heard about Hurricane Sandy.  Thank you to everyone who thought of, prayed for, and contacted us that were affected by the storm.  Most people in uptown Manhattan (where I live) were fortunate to never lose power.  Folks in Lower Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens were not as fortunate and have realized great loss as a result of the storm (i.e. homes, cars, and even lives).  In fact, thousands of New Yorkers are still without power, not to mention millions of other people all over the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic United States.

In anticipation of the storm's approach, we stayed home and worked from our apartments on Monday.  As the storm approached, commuting to work became dangerous as the winds intensified.  Walking was the only possible mode of transportation:  the New York City subway system shut down on Sunday night (that's how I get to work).  It moves 8.5 million people every day.

During my lunch hour on Monday, I walked down to the banks of the Hudson River in Riverside Park to see the water.  To my surprise, many other people had the same idea, playing down by the water, unaware of the damage that would soon be done.  It reminded me of the men playing hockey with the iceberg ice on the forward deck of Titanic.

The parks were technically closed, but thousands of people, including me, ignored the police tape that read "police line do not cross" to seek the adventure of being a part of this storm.  At one point, a police car pulled up near the water and began to shout through his speaker "the park is closed!  Everyone must leave now!"  As I passed that police officer, I intended to continue walking, thinking that it was a recording whose advice I did not need to heed.  I was wrong.  "The park is closed!  Everyone must leave now!  Yes, you, sir!  You in the shorts!  Turn now and leave the park now!"  It was a real officer.  I couldn't ignore him.

I lost cable/internet/phone on Monday night and stayed home on Tuesday as well.  The researchers were back in the office on Wednesday.  Some subway and bus service was restored on Thursday.  This city is resilient, but normalcy will still take several weeks, maybe months, to return.  I am very fortunate; nothing bad happened to me.  But there are millions of others for whom that is not the case.  Pray for them.

the apartment

Last month, I moved into my apartment in Manhattan's Upper West Side.  It is a studio on the first floor of a post-war condominium building between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue - very close to Riverside Park and the Hudson River.

My awesome mom and my talented cousin, Kambree, traveled all the way to New York City to decorate the apartment for me.

When I first walked into the apartment and got the place cool, the cool air, fresh paint, and some other magical quality made it smell and feel like the basement of the SUB in New Student Programs in the summertime.  Now that was a nice feeling on my first day there!

Here are some pictures of it that I think you will enjoy.

An aerial view from the ladder to the loft area.  

The doorways on either side of that bookshelf lead to the bathroom (left) and to the kitchen (right).  

On the brick wall, you can see my framed copy of President Brooks' Message to the Senior Class of 1931 and a 1836 map of the Republic of Texas.  My piano is in the left hand corner of the picture; I play hymns everyday.