Both are in our garage right now.
Our garage pets, as we fondly call our mice, have been known to swipe the peanut butter from the mouse traps without triggering the mechanism that shuts on their tails. We are very proud at the skill of our pets, as they constantly risk their lives for a scanty portion of food.
Sometimes, however, one of our pets gets careless. Then there is a mouse carcass, a blood spattered mass of fur. Although we try to dump these carcasses as soon as they appear, there are those nights that we can not get to it. And this is where the mystery begins.
The garage doors are shut, and the window is closed. And on one side of the garage and one side only, the mouse carcass is slowly consumed. The next morning, we find half a mouse, and if we leave over night again, the entire mouse is gone. But if the carcass is on the other side of the garage, the carnivore does not seem to consider it worth the effort.
And thus our conclusion was this: we are experiencing an invasion of cannibal mice.
The dumpster also sits in our garage. It is very smelly like most garbage dumpster, and looks like a large black rectangle standing vertically upright on the ground. In the back of it are two good-sized wheels, used for wheeling it down the driveway come garbage day. At least, there
used to be two wheels.
One of these wheels must have been disgusted with its job. Not too long ago, my brother was wheeling the dumpster down the driveway when a wheel popped off and would not stay on. We found that if we kicked it back on its axle every five seconds on its trip down the driveway, it tended to be fairly usable.
Gradually, it grew looser and looser, until one day, it decided to fall off just as the garbage truck came around, and our obliging trash-guys decided to take our wheel along with our other garbage.
Then my brother had to
unicycle our dumpster down the drive way. I can only imagine that he found it hard, as wheeling a heavy, smelly thing down a long drive way on one wheel, seems to imply that the majority of the weight and smell was on him - not the wheel. Perhaps that is why he did not seem too upset when that wheel fell off also.
Now we have a dumpster sled. My brother still employs the last wheel when necessary, but he stores this wheel in the garage so that no one can mistake it for garbage. So maybe, just maybe, the garbage collector will have pity on us and give us a new dumpster soon....
