Somehow, a box of tissues wound up on the floor. In a normal house, this would be a virtual non-event. Someone would walk by, see them, pick them up, and put them away. Luckily for you, we live in a house where people don’t seem bothered by boxes of tissues in odd places. I’d be wiling to bet that I could glue an inverted box of tissues to the living room ceiling and not hear a word about it for months. Unless someone sneezed, in which case I’d be asked where the tissues were. In such a situation I might reply with a single finger pointed up, resulting in wonder and excitement from my children who would have completely missed the point of the exercise.

This time though, the tissues were left on the floor where we all stepped over them for days. One day something changed, at which point I stopped and stared, trying to figure out what had caught my eye. Then it struck me; the tissues were suddenly outside the box. Read More

Here in the woods of New Jersey, when the leaves start to fall and the temperature drops, we all tend to spend more time indoors. And by “we”, I mean family, dogs, and the filthy vermin commonly known as mice.

Our rodent problem is not a unique one. Go to any hardware store around here in October, and you’ll see the mousetrap section picked over like the dairy aisle in a supermarket before a hurricane.

I tend to be a “live and let live” kind of guy. In the past I’ve used live traps so that I could release the gentle creatures into the wild where they might frolic and play. Those days are gone I’m afraid—now I kill ’em dead. I felt bad while disposing of the first thirty or so. After fifteen years of battle, I now have the blackened soul of a cold-hearted executioner. My wife though, she’s the scary one. Read More