Mouse Hunt

Last night, while I was dishing up tea (rainbow trout, broccoli and new potatoes), the cat (Polly) brought a mouse in. Polly seems to be reasonably proficient at catching rodents and birds, but doesn't seem to know what to do with them once she has them - she lacks the killer instinct perhaps. We turned our living room upside down looking for it but to no avail.

This morning I found Polly staring intently our DVD tower so I sealed off the living room and the cat and I spent the next hour smashing about trying to catch the little bugger. At one point I managed to corner it behind some shelves which are flush with the floor; I reached behind them and felt fur. The poor little thing was in a panic and breathing heavily, and Polly still seemed to think it was under the rug, so before grabbing hold I decided to try and soothe it a little by stroking it gently. That's when it bit me, hard enough to draw blood! Eventually, having chased the mouse through the maze of speaker wire behind the TV, Polly manged to scare it into an overturned bag of wrapping paper, which I was able to pick up, the mouse still inside, and rush outside with before Polly knew what had happened. When I got back inside she was still stalking around our upended sofa looking for the mouse.

With the furniture in disarray, and all those embarrassing hard to clean areas on display, I decided it was a good time for a bit of a spring clean. It's now four o'clock and I've probably managed half a spring clean I'd say. I am going to invest some serious time in the concept of a self-cleaning house I think - cleaning and tidying is hard work, boring and never ending.

PKD

I am currently reading my first Philip K. Dick novel, called Valis, which is the one which my Father claims changed him from an atheist into an agnostic. The passage which had this effect on him didn't really rock my world, but as a whole I've found the novel quite unsettling. There are a lot of references to different religions, some of which are now extinct. I've enjoyed looking into them, but it has meant slow progress as I keep having to Wiki things like Zoroastrianism.

Fit

I went to the gym for only the second time in 2009 today. It was the same as ever: soft porn on the TVs, dance music, the smell of sweat and boredom (both mine). I do have a vague sense of achievement now though.

Today I discovered that

the word fiancee has two es. The single e spelling is American. The source for this information - rather appropriately I thought - was my fiancee. Now, if I could just work out how to accent letters in Blogger, it might appear that I've a vague Idea what I'm doing.

Upon further investigation the single e spelling is not American. Fiance is masculine, fiancee is feminine. The same works for blond and blonde. I had no idea that there were feminine and masculine words in English.

Manc

On Tuesday my fiance, my sister and I visited my brother in Manchester where he is reading philosophy. In the evening we tried some banana ale before heading to a rock club called Satan's Hollow. The club was in a basement with an interior that looked like something out of Silent Hill: sinewy, fleshy walls with devils faces leering out and bars on the windows made for the perfect environment in which to thrash around to some heavy metal. A shame, then, that the DJ elected to play indie all night long.

The next day I tortured the girls by dragging them round an exhibition called Subversive Spaces. It was about surrealism and hysteria in modern art and should prove very useful for my modernism essay.

Holy Sh*t

Is it wrong to read the Bible on the toilet?

Valentine

Not the misguided bobby from Hollyoaks - the annual money spinner for card companies, chocolateers and florists. This year was fun though: my fiance had booked something before Christmas which I'd completely forgotten about and so I was pleasantly surprised when we ended up at the Alexandra Theatre to see Dylan Moran. I particularly enjoyed the end of the set when he lapsed into the surreal and began shouting about flaming penguins diving into a sea of crisps and space hopper mounted Zulu warriors spearing frogs in a giant wok.

During the bar crush at the interval we ran into some friends and arranged to meet up next door in the Rock / Cocktail bar for a couple of Moquitos after the show. It was too loud to talk properly really but we had a few drinks and nodded heads to AC/DC and Led Zeppelin.

Winter Wonderland

A real one this time. My lecture was cancelled due to the snow this morning so on my way home I decided to go for a stroll in in the park. I've been yearning to get to there for weeks and it felt good to get the old leg muscles working again. I found it difficult at times to find my way due to the snow covering, but it was very pretty. Here is a photo of the partly frozen lake with some ducks negotiating between the ice:

Grim up north

Well, cold anyway. My fiance had a work thing in Sheffield on Friday so, since it happened to be her birthday too, we decided to spend the weekend there. The hotel we stayed in used to be a Grammar School, a grand old building right in the city centre and quite luxurious. On Friday night we had a lovely Italian meal before stumbling upon an indie / rock club where we sang and danced and generally made a fool of ourselves until 3am. Saturday we slowly recovered, checked out an art gallery in the afternoon and then went for a cracking feed at a Mexican called El Paso.

On the way home today we stopped off at Peveril Castle in Derbyshire for a look at the picturesque views from the keep. It was snowing by the time we'd ascended the slope which made the way down rather treacherous for my fiance in her high heels!