Greetings from Casa La Freakout

It's hard to blog when you're having a nonstop anxiety attack.

Yesterday I was doing my normal yoga workout in the basement when I heard what sounded like an animal scurrying overhead in the drop ceiling. I thought maybe I imagined it until I saw said animal through the plastic cover of the fluorescent fixture. Freaked out, called the first exterminator I could find by leafing my shaking hands through the Yellow Pages that said "24 hour emergency service." Guy came out, tore out some ceiling tiles to put a net up there, couldn't catch it. I thought it might be a squirrel, he thought it might be a rat. He said we also have mice because he saw droppings on the fixture cover.

Great. Just great.

Based on what he could tell from the droppings, WHICH WERE IN MOST CORNERS OF THE LAUNDRY ROOM, he said we have many, many mice -- too many to handle with snap traps or glue traps -- and possible rats as well. So now I have a basement laundry room full of rodenticide bags, what I still think is a squirrel dying slowly of starvation in my drop ceiling, possibly rats as well, and I have to keep the cats out of the basement entirely -- and hope the mice don't come upstairs. This has to go on for 4-6 weeks.

And they're predicting snow tonight.

And I'm headed out of town for a few days on Wednesday, and Mr. Brilliant is counting the hours till I leave because I am driving him crazy freaking out about the vermin and obsessing about whether the cats will be safe. And no, there's no way I can farm them out to someone else.

And the exterminator said I can't go out with a caulking gun and seal up cracks until we get rid of the mice, because they have to go out to get water, which activates the poison.

So that's why you haven't seen me blog today on the generals who plan to quit if Bush orders a military strike against Iran; Sy Hersh reporting on how an attack plan to be kicked off within 24 hours of a presidential order to go ahead is being developed; and Frank Rich noting how the media obsession with the Anna Nicole/Britney circus is just too reminiscent of the summer of 2001, and how the Bush Administration has made us MORE, not less, likely to be attacked.

But I have new sympathy for those in charge of that KFC/Taco Bell in New York that was shut down because of rodent infestation. I'm told that this is what happens when you have a milder-than-expected winter that suddenly turns cold -- the assorted wildlife that is increasingly migrating to suburbia as its habitat is destroyed go looking for places to keep warm.