Poor Winston. Mastiff's are very conservative dogs. They like to pretty much do the same thing at the same time every day. Variety is not the spice of life for them. Well, except for when it comes to new kinds of food.

Which reminds me: I really should NOT have given Winston my leftover linguine with garlic sauce. Hot garlic dog breath! Now there's a scent you'll never get in a Yankee Candle. Thank God.

Anyway, I asked The Hub to take the legs off of the large table I use to photograph and pack up eBay items...

and take it downstairs to try to make the office look bigger for the home showings. The dog had become very fond of sleeping under there, and now that the table is gone he just circles the room....I guess hoping that it will magically come back. Then he lays down for a minute in the middle of the floor and gives me a baleful look. But, he's not content.

He's also depressed that he has to go back to sleeping on his dog bed. He was sleeping on the bed in the guest room. He really likes that bed because it's very comfortable and it's up against the wall which makes him feel secure. The trouble is that after awhile it REALLY smells like a dog up there. Winston isn't smellier than other dogs, it's just that there's a LOT of Winston. So, we make an effort to keep the guest room door closed.

He slept in our room on his dog bed last night....but he snored. So I went down to sleep on the sofa, because, you guessed it, if I'd gone in the guest room he'd have come in and hopped into bed WITH me. And still snored!!

This morning I woke up to hot garlic dog breath.

In other news, I think we have a mouse. Winston got up last night and went over to one of the lower cabinets cocking his head as we heard a distinct scurrying sound. Sigh. That's just what I need.

Now that Vio-Kitty has gone ( an episode I never wrote about on the blog - I was way too upset) our house has become a prime candidate for rodentia houseing. It's an older home with lots of ways in. There's dog food sitting around, making a ready food source. And, at least one of the home owners (me) has a real aversion to killing things outright.

If I have a cat and the cat kills a mouse or a chipmunk or even a bird, well, I don't get upset about that. After all, that's the nature of cats. When you get a cat, their hunting comes along with the cat. Heck, a lot of times that's the reason why people HAVE cats.

But when it's me vs. a mouse....I have a hard time. I know that they carry disease, that they're destructive, that they'll chew through wiring. The thing is, I don't really like to kill ANYTHING. Ants, okay, I tell myself, they're on my turf. It's like an invasion by an alien species when they're marching in aiming to secure the sugar bowl. So I set out ant traps. And that's a pretty fair fight because the ants are half immune to the poison anyway.

Spiders, flies, and even bees, though I'm allergic to them, I make every effort to capture them and put them outside. Well, not the spiders. I leave them alone unless they're, say, in the middle of the bathroom floor just hanging around right before everybody shows up for family dinner. But spiders aren't bad to have around the house - they keep out other types of bugs and are helpful to the garden. The thing about flying insects is that they're just off course. They don't any more want to be in my house than I want them to be in my house. So, I let them out. There's enough room in the world for me and them.

Mice,though...they're mammals, for one thing. Little fur bearing animals, motivated by some of the same things that motivate me: get in out of the cold and get something to eat. They're so SMALL. It's not a good feeling to have such an advantage over your adversary. I'd feel better about killing them if they were, say the size of Winston. Of course, I'd probably not be able to kill them if they were the size of Winston. But that's beside the point. I can hardly manage to kill them now!

Oh, hell, who am I kidding? I'm not going to work myself up into killing any mice, but I've got to get them out of here. It's like Rob said, "You almost never have one mouse." I'd better just go up to Target and spend the money on those humane traps where you can let them out in the woods later....which is probably not humane at all. But at least their blood and fur won't be on my conscience.

I've got enough on there already.