moosifer jones's lair & grouch – online home & blog of Mags L Halliday

Sébastian Schrödinger, my ruthless mouser, died on 13 December 2010, of a particularly aggressive cancer.

Séba was never really a cuddlesome cat: laps were things to claw at rather than sleep on. His idea of a gentle wake-up was to put his paws under the duvet and dig the claws into any toes he found there. He didn’t sit on my lap while I worked: he preferred to sit close by, between the chair and the heater, so that I developed a habit of looking under my chair before wheeling it backwards.

I found Séba at the Little Valley Animal Shelter in March 2005. I blogged about his backstory at the time.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll know he most regularly featured as a mouser extraordinaire – his final kill count had over fifty mice, twenty-four birds of some sort and three rats. He loved leaving them in stupid places (warning, photo contains dead mouse).

He started to quack like a duck a little while back, and the vet found a very aggressive lump against his throat. It was inoperable, and untreatable, so it was a case of waiting till he couldn’t eat properly. The vet I saw on Monday suggested he might have been older than the four years he was guesstimated at back in 2005. I hope so, I hope he had a lot longer than 9 years of life.

Sébastian’s new kill count:

• Rodents:
  Mice – 19 22
  Voles – 4 5
• Birds:
  Sparrows – 3 4
  Dunnocks – 1
  Uncertain – 2
• Other:
  Frogs – 1
  Unidentifiable remains – 2

This is not due to a sudden burst of killing, just that I’ve not been updating the online kill totals for the last few weeks because of being away a lot. One friend, house-sitting, had to clear a mouse away. Whilst on another day I saw Séba with a dead adult mouse in his mouth which he then ran off with and subsequently found a tiny dead baby mouse by my shoes. There is a very good reason for me loving Looshkin from the Bear comics so much. (Jamie is currently running Looshkin caption competitions on his LJ.)

In related cleaning up news, albeit work which doesn’t require CSI sytle gathering of bloody evidence into plastic bags, my desktop PC decided it didn’t want to run Windows anymore. This meant a panicked back-up using DOS and floppy disks before a full reinstall. I need the desktop as it is much better for my spine and hand to be working at a proper desk instead of on a laptop on top of an old singer foot pedal sewing machine table. So today I am restoring my files from the floppy disks and deciding which of the many half-finished things in the ‘working’ folder need saving. I’ve got to move my website over to a new server as well, but I’m delaying that task for now.

I’m also getting to grips with blogger.beta, which is not bad and lets me tag my posts. the slight drawback there is that I shall want to be going back through several years of posts, tagging them as appropriate and that will make them pop back up on RSS sub and the LJ feed. So I’m sorry about that, but lookie! You’ll be able to find all my posts about travel or Séba’s kill count really easily!

I am home. Home for at least two weeks. Last weekend I was in Yorkshire, visiting the Chap’s family, then I was working in Greenwich for three days this week. All the people I met were lovely and I had a good time, but I jumped the earliest train I could last night, prefering to stand from London to Newbury rather than waiting 30 minutes and perhaps getting a seat. I just wanted to be back as soon as possible. I dropped my bags in the hallway, raced straight back out in order to get
a) chips from The Tasty Plaice just before it closed
b) slightly out of date Budvar from Cheers offie
Then I curled up on the sofa and enjoyed the senstation of knowing my travels are over for a while.

This morning I woke naturally at 6.45am – i.e. the time I’d been getting up whilst in London – and went straight back to sleep with the happy awareness that I didn’t have to move. Sébastian then woke me at 8am to demand food and to show me the dead sparrow in the lounge. The kill totalizator needs updating with the various beasties of the last month, which I shall do later. Right now I’m updating various blog entries. There’s something slightly odd about seeing even a bird corpse as a thing to be enjoyed as a small familar moment. Chips, beer, using the habitat mugs with the floral pattern on the handle, going out to get the paper and some bread: these are things which should be enjoyed. Not bird corpses.

I just got back from London, having spent Saturday at the fruitstock festival organised by innocent. Lovely leisurely weekend kicking around town and home to the still base-1 tidy house. I did all my chores and settled in with a horror movie.

• Rodents:
  Mice – 18 19
  Voles – 4
• Birds:
  Sparrows – 3
  Dunnocks – 1
  Uncertain – 2
• Other:
  Frogs – 1
  Unidentifiable remains – 2

Séba appeared around the corner of the sofa, eyes wide and dark, mouse hanging from his mouth.

• Rodents:
  Mice – 17 18
  Voles – 4
• Birds:
  Sparrows – 3
  Dunnocks – 1
  Uncertain – 2
• Other:
  Frogs – 1
  Unidentifiable remains – 2