We went to bed before midnight, and when we woke up it was nearly nine o'clock, so that was the New Year gone, and we missed it. According to an online Guardian poll last night, 87% of people were planning to spend the evening at home, but of course the ones who were out partying probably didn't complete the survey on the Guardian website. A Guardian fashion columnist said that even if staying in it was obligatory to dress up for New Year's Eve, but she can't have been sharing her sofa with a very affectionate and perennially moulting ginger and white cat.
The electric rat zapper in the greenhouse went off without catching anything two nights in a row, and after the second false alarm it made a strange buzzing noise when I reset it, so I put it to dry out in the warmth of the laundry room in case it had got damp, and replaced it with the one from the garage. The mouse death toll in the greenhouse immediately resumed, with one that night and another the next. The zapper in the laundry stopped buzzing once it had had twenty-four hours to dry off, so I put it back down in the garage and caught another mouse there. The Systems Administrator said that this was very good as it proved that the zapper still worked. Apparently my confidence that once it had warmed up and stopped buzzing it would be fine was misplaced.
The Systems Administrator has not suffered any more mouse damage in the blue shed since the original paint incident, or caught any more mice, and has taken to keeping the paint in a locked chest and bringing it indoors at night anyway, so the SA offered me the use of an extra zapper in the greenhouse. Mice have been digging in the geranium pots on the staging as well as eating the tops off the Muscari, so I could do with an extra line of defence. This winter seems like a plague year for mice. Maybe it was the mild weather. Or perhaps it is simply in the nature of populations of small furry animals to go up and down, like lemmings.
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