And now for something a little different....

It's late now...but we're still up - and on a weeknight!

Adrenaline is rushing because...we caught a mouse!

Eeeek!!

Background: So we saw a mouse scurrying about a few months ago, tried comically to catch the darn thing, and failed. We set out trap for the little bugger but no bites...we figured we must have scared the bejesus out of him and he high tailed it outta the house lickety split.

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

This week we noticed something gnawing at Hannah's dog treats - argh! He's back!
So I set out some clap traps baited with peanut butter and played the waiting game - next day, no mouse, still peanut butter....next day, no mouse, no peanut butter - blasted!

At least we were getting somewhere...so just this evening I was lounging on the couch having a little chat with my dear Miss Hanson while Dan perused through this month's Ecology issue.., when - gasp! He spots a mouse dash from the kitchen to the closet where we keep Hannah's vittles.

What to do?!?!?

Well, I decide to tape the gap at the bottom of the door shut with some clear packing tape lest he escape, and I continue on with my nice little chat with Miss Hanson...

After my chat (during which we see the mouse peek out from the door, note the packing tape, and scurry back to the depths of the closet at least twice), Dan and I discuss the options for our furry unwelcomed guest (BTW, Hannah is downright useless in the pest-catching department. She would like to fancy herself a threat to squirrels and cats alike, but the truth is she is too slow to catch anything and too scared to know what to do with any feeble-minded prey that she just might stumbled upon). A quick google search of "how to catch a cornered mouse" proves somewhat useless...catch the mouse with a dust broom and pan and throw it out of the house, shoo the mouse into a tin can and drive it at least a mile away from the house...etc...

So we come up with our own plan -> open door, trap mouse in closet with window screens, slowly remove items from the closet to get at the mouse, and use the shop vac to vacuum the thing up, hope the mouse suffocates in the vacuum and then throw away said mouse.

Easy peasy right??

Well, actually, yes it was in fact that easy and couldn't have gone more smoothly had we invited the Navy Seals to complete the mission...We open the door, I hold the screen to keep it trapped in the closet, I slowly hand Dan random things in my way between us and victory (and a sound night of sleep) and...

! SNAP!

one of the mouse traps goes off as Mr. Mousey desperately hops around the closet with no possible escape. We're all startled, but the trap doesn't actually catch the mouse, it just scares us both...soldier on...Dan hands me the shop vac and turns it on, and poke and prod around with it until ....SLURP!!!! Elation mixed with **shudders** washes over us...

Well, we caught the mouse in the shop vac, now what?

Um, we can't just keep it in the shop vac, we don't know if it is alive or dead, we don't want to just open the shop vac outside to free it right outside our house, so what do we do?

Well, we drive down to the Riverwalk (which is at least a mile away) to open the shop vac there - to find either a very frightened mouse that we will free and hope it will never return to our casa, or, we find a mouse dead as a door nail that will now "sleep with the fishes".

Regardless we've been needing to empty out the shop vac, so this is really a win win for everyone involved.

So I carry the shop vac with a bag over the opening in the hose, lest the mouse run out the vac via the hose and escape in our car (bad) while Dan drives us to a well-lit, but empty parking lot next to the Bama Belle (the river boat that chugs along the Black Warrior for various events including our Brews Cruise we took early upon our arrival in T-Town). We brace ourselves for anything.

...I open the shop vac carefully, we peer inside...and we see...a mouse that once was, but alas, is no more...relief...closure...(sadness yes, but really folks, it's a mouse eating Hannah's food and god knows what)..

.so we unceremoniously dump the contents of the shop vac into the trash can - a mound of Hannah fur the size of a large well-fed rabbit and, a dead mouse.

As a last "screw you" the mouse is the last thing to fall out of the shop vac and thuds onto the rim of the trash can, refusing to leave our presence without a final "goodbye"...great...now there is a dead mouse brightly perched on the rim of the trash receptacle and Dan states we should just leave it and flee the scene... right...so little Timmy and his mother carry on with their morning stroll in which they always get a sweet tea and a blueberry scone, walk along the river and point out different birds they see, and dispose of their wrappers in a responsible fashion and then BAM...they are faced a symbol of their mortality in the form of a dead mouse...(In all reality a feral cat, rabid squirrel, or desperate crow would have found that thing and devoured it post haste).

..but in any case, Dan valiantly takes a plastic bag and pushes the rodent into its final resting place ..."thump"...

we get back into the car and drive home at 11:30pm on a Wednesday night after disposing of a body down by the river which we offed with a shop vac (now nicknamed "The Widow Maker" according to Dan)...

..sigh...I need to be writing my thesis right now...

xo

Hi!

Hi there!

Well we are back up to "hot" in Alabama...the house is currently 80 degrees and it's 8:31 pm!  There's a nice breeze so it's actually not all that bad.  I dropped off Amy at the airport yesterday after first dropping Jon and Alex at the airport for an April Iceland sampling trip.  Then Amy and I had coffee and lunch (so-so lunch, my crawfish perogies were great, her catfish cakes needed some flavor), then stopped at the peanut depot for some salted peanuts, and then off to the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum where we spent the rest of the afternoon taking it all in.  The museum is quite hi-tech, it starts off with an 8 minute video in a small room, then the screen rises to reveal the rest of the museum, there were a lot of interactive displays, a lot of audio and visual displays, tons of cool photographs - amazing!  Definitely something to see again as there is so much to see.  It was pretty cool to see pictures of how parts of downtown Birmingham once was in its heyday...now, not so much, but trying to get there.

All in all I had a lot of fun with Amy visiting - she is a dear friend from way back when.  Unsure how exactly she puts up with me, but I think that goes both ways (she's a loud Italian and loves it, my eardrums suffer).  We ate a lot of good ol' Southern food, saw things I've never seen before here in the South (largest slave cemetery in the South! old southern houses! Gip's Place!).  It's always fun to host visitors and show them around your new hometown while discovering new things that make you love your home even more (Thank You Amy!!!).  I think all of the Bio Grad students are enourmously thankful for the Gip's Place experience - all are the envy of us!!

all for now, I head into Coweeta tomorrow for monthly sampling...should be beautiful up there, and I look forward to a meal at Manrique's, even though I've eaten so much this past week...more soon...

More Pics 

Quick Hi!!!

Hi Folks!

It's been a busy few weeks, hence being MIA in the blog world...but, the skinny:

1) Amy is visiting us!!  Amy is one of my best friends from middle school...20 years we're known each other...that in itself is crazy...what we've done while she's been here is also crazy - see pictures (Gip's Place - a Juke Joint in Bessemer, various historic sights in Eutaw, AL, the garage sale...)  she is a 19th century American historian so she's in her element here...

2) We had a garage sale!!  Our neighbors and friends came and contributed as well, the Chau-Dan contingency sold over $200 in what we deem as "junk"...but to someone else - treasure...either way we were pleased and had a great day sitting outside with friends, BBQing, makin' deals with the locals, etc...fantastic!!

3) Gip's Place - One of Amy's (many) wishes whilst in Alabama was to visit a Juke Joint to listen to some blues, lucky for her we have google, which resulted in finding Gip's Place in Bessemer,which can be difficult to explain in words, but we can say weekly house party with blues, BYOB, selling shirts dyed with the red clay dirt underneath the stage at Gip's...just crazy...

more soon...

xo

Another post!

Here's a quickie - 

Dan and I went to the first Farmer's Market of the season at the new Riverside Market by the Black Warrior River this morning.  The space is awesome, let's hope the farmers like it and come sell their wares!  There was a small showing today - they'll have a month of soft openings before the grand opening in May.

I grabbed some mulch from the UA arboretum finally!  Now I feel like the garden is ready for the season...$10 for a load of compost mulch and we are good..I think it makes the garden really shine..

pictures here!

Also, watch the Hengill Diaries blog if you haven't in a while - it was quite the winter!!

okie dokie, time to hit work!

xo

hi!

Here is a link for some pics from March's First Friday at Grace Aberdean with Simon's art opening!

Also, a few pics from the last few weeks...some work in the garden finally, and field work... 

This past weekend we went out on a collection trip, Dan came along to help speed things along.  We left Friday night and made it to Atlanta to try some SE pho - the original plan was to hit up Pho Bac, but they close at 9 (boo), so they steered us to Pho 24, which, as you may have guessed, is open 24 hours a day - they said they get pretty crowded around 3 am when the clubs let out..the pho was decent, and we grabbed some banh mi sandwiches for lunch the next day - pretty tasty, but still ain't got nothing on Westminster sammies...the hunt continues...

Field work was successful, but most exciting was a dinner at Manrique's, our favorite place to eat when we go out in the field, where we gorged ourselves silly on carnitas nachos, lengua and cabeza tacos, chorizo sopes, and quesadillas with every delicious meat imaginable.  We also tried a new place for lunch on Sunday before heading home a place called Universal Joint  in downtown Clayton, GA- it was awesome, mostly because of the outdoor seating and the wonderful sunny day that accompanied us.  They had some pretty tasty tater tots and a great B.A.T. - bacon arugula tomato sammy that I had.  Dan's burger was pretty tasty as well.  There are a few other locations in NC - maybe they'll come to Tuscaloosa!! 

Anyhow, it's time to get back into the groove of the work week and try to keep cool - it's supposed to get into the 90s sometime this week - yikes!!!

xo

Making up for lost time...

Hannah investigates some packaging we got in the mail the other day.

Some pics, including a few pics from the Spring Break trip and our amazing meal at DeLorenzo's...

cheers!

it's been so long...

Pictures!!! of the last month...

Here's part of the last month's recap:

Hallo!!  I am writing from the passenger seat with about 2 more hours of driving to go until we reach home.  It's been quite a month and we've neglected the blog in a heinous way – my apologies.  I suppose we should work backwards…

SPRRRRIIIIINNNNGGG BRRREEEEEEAAAAAAK!!!

Dan, Hannah and I left last week to drive to Bethlehem, PA –where Dan's family lives.  We were going to surprise Jen (Dan's older sister) and her kids Maddie and Willie since they can't get enough of Uncle Danny.  We were successful in surprising them, and as an added bonus they got Hannah and me as well.  Hannah proved to win best supporting actor in this trip – with the kids warming up the Hannah like butter on toast.  We spent most of the week relaxing at his parent's house.  Hannah enjoyed her days sleeping in the middle of the sunrays in the living room as well as outside in the expansive backyard.  Dan and I got to catch up on a lot of TV – which is one of our favorite things to do during vacations…Dan showed me around his old stomping grounds, and we explored some new restaurants and local brews.  We cooked a yummy meal of pork tenderloin with mango salsa, jalepeno cornbread, and roasted brussel sprouts and grilled zucchini on a beautiful Sunday evening while sipping some Good People beers we brought up from the Deep South.  Dan and I were ready for a chilly Spring Break but were super lucky with the weather for the most part…sun, warm 60-70 temps – so nice.  Dan, Caroline (the middle sis), and I drove into Philly on a fine east coast day.  Dan hadn't been to Philly in quite some time, and I was a newbie.  Caroline drove us into the city (only about an hour n a half!) and we started the morning off right by comparing two philly cheese steak standbys – Pat's and Geno's.  They are conveniently located across the street from each other just south of downtown Philly.  Dan had told me how there is a correct way and an incorrect way to order a cheese steak – if you want onions, you say "wit" as in "with onions"…you do NOT however say "with onions" lest you wish to be castigated by the person taking your order – which, at both joints, were large surly philly men…we got both our cheese steaks "wit whiz" which is with onions and cheese whiz, the standard – so delicious.   We unanimously agreed that Geno's had our #1 vote out of the two places – for their bun, placement of cheese (below the meat where it would mingle with the meat juice and permeate each bite of the bun), and onions which were larger and tastier.  Not that we would ever shun a Pat's cheese steak from our mouths – hardly!  After that double whammie we continued what would later be deemed the start of the death march through Philly.  We walked about 2+ miles to the Mutter Museum after my navigation took a few missteps – thankfully it was a beautiful day and we got plenty of some local color.  I think the long walk was good to settle our stomachs before entering the Mutter, because it ain't for the queasy!  The Mutter Museum associated with the College of Physicians and houses some of the strangest human oddities you can possibly think of….I think Dan and I must have read about the museum separately – and it sounded interesting….from now on I think we will refer to our lives as "B.M." and "A.M." – "Before Mutter", and "After Mutter"…because after to check out that museum, things just are not the same.  There were loads of skulls on display with various anomalies and wounds (gunshot to the head being the mildest), bones of gunshot wounds from the civil war, parts of Einstein's brain, a woman (aka, The Soap Lady) who had been naturally mummified due to the correct conditions of humidity and her own fat content (soaponification), and strange skin disorders – a leg of someone who had elephantitis, various weird tumor like protusions, as well another disorder whose name I forget but is described as "a six inch horn growing out of her forehead," this woman also had a horn growing out of her hand…we were all unsure at what point you decide that a two inch horn on your forehead is not cause to go to the doctor, let alone a six inch horn, but hey, perhaps she made some money with a traveling circus.    Leather made out of human skin, amputation kits and birthing tools from the civil war  – the word "wow" comes to mind.  This was all on the top floor of the Mutter, and little did we know this floor was the just the Minor leagues…  On the bottom floor was where the scary stuff was.  Let's just say there were babies in jars people…actual babies, in actual jars – they were medical jars, not leftover spaghetti jars…The highlight was **SPOILER ALERT** a 7-foot colon of a man who died with 40 pounds of poo in his body…That is right – as a child he would not poo for over a month.  He was a regular-sized man aside from this ridiculous belly where his colon continued to grow.  Apparently he had malfunctioning nerves on his colon to tell him he needed to do his business (google image Mutter colon if you dare). 

After that highlight we all needed a drink to lighten the mood – we walked down to 13^th street where we got a table outside with some tasty margaritas with chips n salsa at El Vez.  It was a brightly colored Mexican joint that was a great resting place.  We made it up to Reading terminal which was similar to Pike Place Market in Seattle, except with a lot more food vendors.  We got some ice cream at Bassett's, a brew at Molly Malloy's, and then walked over to 9^th and Filbert, which is made infamous by reality TV's Parking Wars…we continued the loop over towards Penn's Landing and stumbled a great section of town off of South street where we sat for a drink to people watch.  Just as South street was getting hoppin' we exited the city, super content in our day of exploring Philly.

We left Friday morning after a wonderful week relaxing in PA - thanks to the family for hanging out with us and making the trip super fun!   It was great to meet the rest of the family and introduce Hannah to them.  We had some amazing food and great laughs over the week...

We stopped in Blacksburg, VA to visit Virginia Tech and see what the hubbub that Corianne had been spoutin' about her alma mater, a very cool place indeed.  After exploring the campus a bit on foot with Hannah, we relaxed in the sun at The Cellar and shared a pita pizza (Hawaiian pizzas are always made better by the addition of bacon) then headed to Radford, VA where the closest La Quinta Inn was located.  We spent the night relaxing with some TV (I told you we loved it during vacations) and a quick dip in the whirlpool that came with the room – no more standard rooms left for the night…Hannah slept like a rock.  Next day we drove into Knoxville, TN for a lunch and quick drive around tour of the city - turns out Knoxville is pretty darn cool!!!  The sunsphere is not the only draw of Knoxville (thank you to The Simpsons for introducing us to that American landmark) - the downtown was an awesome market that reminds me of the ones we would stumbled upon in Spain...

...to be continued...