This is the first edition of the New Improved Baja Manitoba Free Press.
Long before I started keeping mousies, I was married to a person who fancied himself to be a Southern Gentleman, and he complained how I had dragged him off to the frozen northlands of Minnesota. One morning, about a month ofter we arrived in Minnesota after a nuptial flight from Maryland, he was heard to exclaim, "eighty degrees below zero" while listening to our local news and weather station at 6:30 in the morning in December 1983. Yes, children, it was The Real Thing; colder than a titches wit; cold enough to freeze your eyeballs if exposed for more than about two seconds. (We'd been married for about six weeks, and he had forgotten that he'd asked me if I wanted him to move back to Minneapolis, Minnesota with me.) It had snowed a foot the day we arrived in town, and then it snowed another foot. Our engine block was frozen solid, so we were out on New Years Eve, busing to and fro for a New Year Eve party.
You see, we pride ourselves, here in Minnesota, on carrying on regardless of the weather or the economy. At 85F below zero, (our Zero is already 32 degrees below the point at which water freezes) we waited for a bus at about 12:45 am on the first day of January, 1984. a car stopped, rolled down the passenger side window, and the driver yelled, "Jeez, are you insane?! Get in and I'll drive you wherever you are going!!"
Of such things are Minnesotans and mousekeepers made. It was about 15 years later than the mousekeeping started. I'd just gotten my first computer, and had come to the conclusion that I had no comfortable use for a mouse with no fur. I was stranded here to face another Minnesota winter all by myself. I needed something warn and furry, and my husband was 1400 miles away, back in !998, when my daughter caught a wild house mouse. She wanted to keep it, so we broke out the little plastic tank that had been occupied by a gecko or chameleon for a couple of weeks until...nvm. So we kept the mousie, but I made her let it go after about two days. The poor little thing was not going to ever survive happily in captivity, so we took it outside and let it go, after which I agreed on a trip to a pet store to check out the available stock.
And, now, here I am, eleven years later, airing my thoughts on an international mouse forum. Those first two mousies were so wonderful; two girlies, one of whom liked to be handled, and another who like to be handled on the off chance it might be able to escape. Ah, those mouses...gotta love 'em. One was black and one was champagne. I thought my mousie desires were fulfilled. And then I saw a tank full of about fifty (way too many) big meeces of every color I could imagine, and then some. Someone had dumped a whole mousery, it seemed, and I was to be the beneficiary. The shopkeeper was also selling 10 gallon tanks that had minor cracks, and I stopped on the way home with my 20 new meeces and got material to construct tops, and a mousery was born.
Long before I started keeping mousies, I was married to a person who fancied himself to be a Southern Gentleman, and he complained how I had dragged him off to the frozen northlands of Minnesota. One morning, about a month ofter we arrived in Minnesota after a nuptial flight from Maryland, he was heard to exclaim, "eighty degrees below zero" while listening to our local news and weather station at 6:30 in the morning in December 1983. Yes, children, it was The Real Thing; colder than a titches wit; cold enough to freeze your eyeballs if exposed for more than about two seconds. (We'd been married for about six weeks, and he had forgotten that he'd asked me if I wanted him to move back to Minneapolis, Minnesota with me.) It had snowed a foot the day we arrived in town, and then it snowed another foot. Our engine block was frozen solid, so we were out on New Years Eve, busing to and fro for a New Year Eve party.
You see, we pride ourselves, here in Minnesota, on carrying on regardless of the weather or the economy. At 85F below zero, (our Zero is already 32 degrees below the point at which water freezes) we waited for a bus at about 12:45 am on the first day of January, 1984. a car stopped, rolled down the passenger side window, and the driver yelled, "Jeez, are you insane?! Get in and I'll drive you wherever you are going!!"
Of such things are Minnesotans and mousekeepers made. It was about 15 years later than the mousekeeping started. I'd just gotten my first computer, and had come to the conclusion that I had no comfortable use for a mouse with no fur. I was stranded here to face another Minnesota winter all by myself. I needed something warn and furry, and my husband was 1400 miles away, back in !998, when my daughter caught a wild house mouse. She wanted to keep it, so we broke out the little plastic tank that had been occupied by a gecko or chameleon for a couple of weeks until...nvm. So we kept the mousie, but I made her let it go after about two days. The poor little thing was not going to ever survive happily in captivity, so we took it outside and let it go, after which I agreed on a trip to a pet store to check out the available stock.
And, now, here I am, eleven years later, airing my thoughts on an international mouse forum. Those first two mousies were so wonderful; two girlies, one of whom liked to be handled, and another who like to be handled on the off chance it might be able to escape. Ah, those mouses...gotta love 'em. One was black and one was champagne. I thought my mousie desires were fulfilled. And then I saw a tank full of about fifty (way too many) big meeces of every color I could imagine, and then some. Someone had dumped a whole mousery, it seemed, and I was to be the beneficiary. The shopkeeper was also selling 10 gallon tanks that had minor cracks, and I stopped on the way home with my 20 new meeces and got material to construct tops, and a mousery was born.