I'm not sure where I left off in the story of the mice. I mean the deer mice, the wild animals we've been temporarily housing so we can give them a ``soft release'' and their best shot at getting back into the wild and out of our living room. When she first caught the two we'd set in the cage ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger thought one of them looked pregnant. But a couple days later, the same mouse didn't, and supposed she had been mistaken.
You know what's come next. It was not a happy surprise to learn that the mouse had had babies, since, among other problems, it pushed back our release date by several weeks. The mice were exceptionally tiny balls of fluff that I never saw, but that bunnyhugger was able to return to the wooden birdhouse the adult mice set up as their nest. There's more here but it's sad and we've had enough of that.
This week, we figured, the baby mice would have aged enough to be mobile and maybe come out on their own. And Monday night what do you know but they did. I saw a little ball of brown energy and worry running on the wheel, and before much longer we saw both of them at once, plus an adult mouse, so we know we're not merely misidentifying them all.
Their great cuteness, and unexplained lack of fear of us, makes a strong case for keeping them as pets. Especially considering deer mice in captivity enjoy a good lifespan of up to eight years --- this is as much as quadruple a house mouse's --- but they would be a lot of trouble to keep as pets. Given how much emotional wrenching we've dealt with lately --- the past month and the past decade --- having a couple balls of happy little running fluff has been rejuvenating.
All going well we'll scout a place to set them soon, and release them soon after that, and they won't live to be eight years old but they'll have more than a couple square feet to be mice in, and things to do besides tear apart toilet-paper tubes and run a wheel. Why can't something ever be just the good parts?
Closing out now our visit that day to The Arcade, when the dream of a new league was a mere fancy. Now, what might be coming up next on the photo roll? We're in October, so amusement parks aren't really in season, but more pinball right after this? What could possibly happen ...
And what's this? Why somehow Velveteen the disapproving plush rabbit is here! That's great!
Here she is, encouraging you to be very tempted to hug but afraid what might happen if you do!
And here's Velveteen hard at work destroying castles on Medieval Madness. You know this is a thoughtful composition because the pinball machine is going straight up, indicating how doing well in the game is an uphill struggle.
Velveteen surveys the game floor from the balcony, where the furries gathered with food and costume gear and stuff.
And here she looks out over the decorated balcony. We can't quite say she likes what she sees, as there isn't a FunHouse below.
The Arcade hosts a lot of parties with a lot of kids who don't see any reason not to push the bright shiny button, such as the one to start a game, but also no reason to walk away once they're bored, strategies that work fine for a video game where you eventually lose your last life but that turn pinball games into a long wait of wondering where the four-player group that finished ball one has gone. This sign is definitely not a futile way of dealing with that.
Trivia: International Latex Corporation's initial, July 1965, contract with NASA was to supply two suits built and sized to astronauts Richard Gordon and Dave Scott, for a price of $89,981 total (something like three-quarters of a million in today's currency). Joe Kerwin and Michael Collins would be added later. Source: Lunar Outfitters: Making the Apollo Space Suit, Bill Ayrey. Gordon, Scott, and Collins would all fly to the Moon, though never on the same mission; Kerwin would fly Skylab.
Currently Reading: Walt Kelly's Pogo and Albert: Dreamin' of a Wide Catfish, Walt Kelly. Editor Mark Burstein.
