2008-08-21 - 5:04 p.m.

..birthdays plus or minus 2 days?...

It is two weeks before classes begin and I'm struggling with my action items. I've spent a lot of today simply plowing through my email inbox to clear up the back log from earlier this summer. I've got to get something done so that I can relieve this stress.

Yesterday was interesting, and probably more like a birthday than my real birthday was. (On my real birthday, I wound up feeling floppy and old.)

Yesterday, after my dentist's appointment, K and I decided to ramble downtown for some shopping, where I found oogabs of new shirts for 70% off at a local department store - which means I have a teaching wardrobe for the fall. (yay)

The interesting part happened after we all came home and the power went out - first all over funcouver...and then later just in our neighborhood.

As darkness approached, K and I aborted our original plan to watch a movie. We put Susi to bed and hung out upstairs on our bed. We hauled out one of our mucho expensive bottles of wine, lit a bunch of candles, and enjoyed the romance of darkness, quiet, candles, wine, and the sound of rain hitting the street. Have you ever noticed how quiet it gets when the power goes out?

Err, that is until the cats find a mouse.. Y'see the landlady painted the catdoor and it no longer fits. So they are replacing it. But cannot find one that fits in its place. So we have a gaping hole in the office, which we think mice have developed into their very own Loetschberg tunnel.

So I came down to grab the wine, and I heard growling on the stairs. Growling from within.....

And there I saw the standoff on the stairs between Mizzy and Lyra. I immediate chastised Mizzy the Mouzer. Only to be shocked - LYRA (who is basically the dumb blonde of our cat family) had caught the mouse. And of course, her first move was to kill it, and then take it over to the baby's activity center to enjoy her meal. ick. GROSS.

Fortunately, we intercepted before the meal began, and were able to remove the rodent before major gory damage was done. ewww.

And then as we sat upstairs feeling increasingly romantic... we realized that we might have a breast milk emergency on our hands. Recall that I have several liters of breastmilk frozen in our freezer... and that the power is out... for an unknown amount of time...

We called around to figure out how long a freezer can actually HOLD its sub zero temps (12-24 hrs)...and if any friends of ours had space to hold large quantities of Lait de la Teranika. Fortunately this was not a problem as the power went back on after about three hours.

So I would prefer to think that yesterday - which involved dentists, shopping, clothing scores, power outages, candles, and dead mice - was a more eventful birthday. So I'm claiming the 20th instead of the 19th this year.