Something that probably doesn't happen to you when you bring your car in for an oil change:

Oil change guy comes over to the driver's side window and presents my air filter for review. The filter is crammed with sunflower seeds and an extraordinary number of acorns. There are even loose acorns littered across the top of the filter presumably awaiting their turn to get stuffed between the felted folds.

oil change guy: Did you know you have someone living in your car?

me: Uh, yes-- their presence has been made known.

Together we gaze with incredulity at the state of the filter. Although having a mouse live in your car is hardly uncommon in these parts, I have clearly won the prize for greatest possible winter stash ever in a single air filter. The guy doesn't offer me any kind of award, but I can tell that I've won.

Oil change guy looks up at me.

oil change guy: Industrious little fella.

me: Indeed.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that a) if there's only one it's clearly a female since she has left me a newborn baby mouse every once and again (like it's not enough I am providing room and board free of charge but now I'm supposed to be offering child care services, too?) or b) from the sounds above my head and the look of that filter, I'm pretty sure the roof of my car would rival early 20th century lower east side tenements for overcrowding.

No doubt there's some asshole landlord up there lording over them all. Hope he takes the fall for the new, clean acornless and seedless air filter. Not sure how the winter harvest gone missing is gonna go down, but no one ever said it was easy being a mouse.

So my afternoon had me loading the dogs in the car and driving the 45 minutes it takes to get to a Staples. A smart person living far from civilization as I do, would have a shelf in her closet with back-up printer ink cartridges in order to prevent emergency trips to the golden mile. And, I actually do have back up ink-- just not the one I needed, grrrr.

What was the sudden emergency? Turns out I need to do some business tax stuff that I didn't realize I needed to do and this is going to take a solid four hours to resolve and it's not fun and as I was driving to Staples I couldn't help thinking-- how did I end up being a small business owner. Isn't there someone I can hire to do this run a business thing for me? Oh wait, that would mean that first I need to generate a revenue to hire someone and then have enough left over so that I can lie supine on the window seat and count raindrops. Which would imply that I was successful on the number crunching side of this whole "entrepreneur" thing-y.

Can we just say that not only am I nobody's entrepreneur-- my strengths are way on the side of idea generation and event planning-- Numbers and I have a strained, rather awkward relationship. Our communication is simply not good. I'm all about glorious, multiple streams of income, and Numbers just has no imagination.

Seriously--- imagine an East German toll collector before the fall of the Berlin wall .. . the guy is all black and white reality check this, reality bites that, blah blah blah.

I suppose there's no one to blame but myself. When I began this whole little party on the lake it was fabulous and riotous and a great time was had by all! However, the next morning, I rolled over and came face to face with Numbers-- I have a vague recollection of inviting him into my bed, but really, he must have seemed so much more fun and exciting that night . . sigh

ooops, and on that note-- I am out of time--- below is yet another really bad camera video I took this morning at the top of the field before we started our walk. It's out of focus, jumpy, over exposed and has no clear subject matter-- hey! hope you enjoy it!

Bisous, E

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