Courage

I made this card for a secretary in my office who has been off sick for a week or so with a serious kidney condition. The lion and "courage" sentiment are by Rubber Soul and the other sentiment is by Penny Black. I stamped the images with Colorbox chalk ink. The lion and courage sentiment are part of a set of clear acrylic stamps. I've been part of the Anti-Clear-Stamp Brigade for many years, although I've decided they have their uses in the last month or so and I've bought quite a few. Wood mounted stamps are still my preference, but acrylic stamps are, of course, great to "line up" as you can see through the mounts. I think they're particularly handy where sentiments are concerned, as it can be difficult to get a small piece of text in the right place. They're also easy to store... and cheaper.

I haven't had much of a week this week. A bit of a nightmare at work, involving numerous late nights (post-midnight) and having to work straight through from 8am-ish on Thursday morning until 1.30pm on Friday afternoon - without sleep. I then slept for most of the remainder of Friday.

We've been having "house mouse problems" recently. We spotted one dark grey fairly large mouse running in the hall and we found a few droppings in an area behind a wicker chest where it must have been sleeping. We couldn't catch it, though, and it ran into the downstairs loo... and was then nowhere to be seen! There are no real exits from the loo, so we're not sure where it went. There's a tiny hole behind the toilet itself where a pipe goes through the wall, so that's the only possibility, I think. It hasn't been seen since, though.

We saw a tiny pale brown mouse in the kitchen today, which we easily caught in one of those "humane" mouse trap things about ten minutes later (it fancied the bit of Twix we'd left inside; I've heard mice like chocolate). It was the smallest mouse I've ever seen and definitely not the one we saw in the hall (which was akin to a small pet gerbil!). The one we found today was about an inch long and looked petrified sitting at the bottom of the "trap" with its bit of Twix. I dispatched it (and the Twix) into some long grass as far away from the house as possible. A mouse of that size would have no difficulty fitting into almost any space, though, so perhaps it's already back with us...

We've had the other, fatter mouse (or perhaps there's more than one?) since at least February and we haven't been able to catch it (although we haven't made much effort, to be fair, and we need to be more pro-active). I remember sending my dad a text message saying we had a mouse (as I could hear it chewing in the attic) and he asked what it was called! I said it was called "Fred" and Fred it remains. We're trying to find him today to enable us to dispatch him to a field somewhere. We have lots of fields nearby, so mice are bound to be a problem, really. Not ideal.