The girls are by far the fiercest. Willing to rip each other apart over a simple seseame soy nut treat. Persistantly rearranging their furniture to suit their wants, toppling and turning over items. The boys are timid and skittish. Peeking around corners and cowering under their toys. Nibbling away at their food in the exact same quiet corner and ignoring new and delicious treats.

When the fight begins, the girls will lead.

Sometimes I think Matt bought a portable air conditioner just so he won't have to hear me repeatedly say, "It's humid." Whenever it's warm and muggy that single thought keeps running through my head. The way that you can't take your mind off of something that makes you uncomfortable, like a pair of tight shoes. When we were at his friend's place a couple of evenings back I regreted wearing jeans even though that's what I had worn all afternoon without feeling like they were sticking to my legs. I didn't share my statement of the obvious, but instead I happily ate a popsicle and repeatedly said to Matt how fantastic it was.

As an undergraduate sometimes when I needed to get some work done I used to pack up my stuff and head off to the library. Partly because of the air-conditioning, but mostly because the library is devoid of any distractions. No laptop, no television, no things to fiddle around with endlessly procrastinating. My roommate always knew when I had a big paper because that's the only time when she'd find me cleaning my half of the room. During graduate school I was much more on task. Only because there was no time to procrastinate trying to balance out work, classes, and day to day living. Seems like a whole other life now. It's not that I no longer have things that need to be done, like my mother says there is always something to do, but rather my momentum is gone.

I never really understood how some writers could force themselves to write for a set amount of time at a set time of day everyday. It seems unnatural to force creativity on a scheduled basis (even when the results are brillant), but at the same time waiting for inspiration won't take you anywhere.

Does it mean you're an adult when in a supermarket the impulse to grab one end of the roll of plastic bags and run just to see how far you can go no longer strikes you?

After another session of examining mouse bottoms, I've sorted out four boys and three girls. A nice balance of gender seeing that ultimately I have five females and four males. I haven't mentioned this yet, but the mini mice are an interesting mix of colors. Three have similar markings as their birth mom (black with white markings), two are dove grey with white markings, one is pure white, and one has a light grey satin shiny coat, very pretty almost silver looking. Care to guess which one is my favorite? :)

In an effort to actually make use of cookbooks on my shelf, I'm going to attempt to try at least one new recipe each week. It may or may not turn out to be good, but it will certainly be interesting.

I had a couple of containers of strawberries that were sitting in the fridge. I love strawberries, but about two-thirds the way through the first container I was already getting tired of them. So as not to waste them, I pureed them and made fresh strawberry sorbet. In its new form, strawberries and I are again on good terms.

Matt doesn't like vegetables unless they are prepared in certain ways or as part of a meat dish, ceaser salad and stir fry are good examples of this. It seems they need to be disguised in flavor to make it onto his plate. Other than his dislike for plain veggies and raw food, he's an easy person to cook for. I doubt he cares much either way, sticking to the old or trying out the new, but I'm hoping that he'll enjoy the new food.

While job hunting, it is both discouraging and reassuring every time you hear how unemployment is worsening and people are continually being laid off. The message essentially being it's the economy that sucks, not you. I'm sure that Matt would also like to point out that I'm not as pro-active about the whole process as I could be. It's true, I could be putting more effort into the hunt. Perhaps I should make a sacrifice to the employment gods :)

I still feel odd being introduced to people as Matt's wife. It's as if unconsciously I'm still expecting to hear the word "girlfriend" in it's place. Even more odd because I don't even blink an eye when I introduce Matt as my husband.

And, of course, a mouse update:

It seems having to tend to seven babies has taken it's toll on Alex. Her new sleeping spot is crammed between the bed and the tank wall. Pressing her belly against the glass is her method of "getting away" since none of the little squeakers can attach themselves to her when she's in that position. Other than that they're all doing well.

Tidying up my desk area has made me more aware of the small army of tchotchkes that I have. What's even more frightening is that the shelves in my old bedroom at my parents house is also filled with them, just to pull a book off the shelf you need to clear off the space in front of it. If there were some ongoing theme to it all I could pass it off as a collection, but there is no theme other than they were either gifts or struck my fancy in some way.

My brother and I used to call cleaning our rooms "searching for treasure" since we'd always rediscover relics from our childhood. But all my childhood relics are stored away in my old bedroom at my parents house, so there really isn't "treasure" to find in a place where I've lived for only a year, at best maybe I'll find some loose change.

Some of the things that Jennifer did when she couldn't sleep late wed. evening/early thurs. morning:

- Wandered about the apartment aimlessly.
- Examined mouse bottoms and guessed at the gender of her mice.
- Painted her fingernails a lovely shade of pink that made her think of rasberry sherbert on a summery day.
- Dug around in the half eaten box of Fruit Loops for the Finding Nemo toy, which turned out to be a pink squid with an unsure expression in its face.
- Stared at the mess she needs to clean.
- Paid some bills.
- Tried coming up with an interesting entry that doesn't revolve around her mice (and failed).

Matt likes to joke that we each need our own seperate rooms. Not seperate bedrooms mind you, but rather rooms of our own where we can toss our respective junk and do what we wish with it. The last time he mentioned it was yesterday while eye-balling my piles of stuff which have slowly been creeping over from my desk onto the floor and into the entire living room space. Although it does not excuse the present mess, I'd like to say that I'm not as bad as I used to be, also he knew the kind of girl he was marrying (having seen and survived the nightmare of my dorm room). The point of this whole paragraph: Cleaning up (at least partially) is on my list of "things to do before Sunday" (and perhaps posting about it will help me to stick to it).

The new mice are growing quickly and are looking more like cute and furry mice instead of tiny naked pink mice. Several people have asked out of curiousity what I'm going to do with the mice. I assumed that even though it was unstated the answer was obvious: I'm keeping them. (I do offer the people who ask a mouse of their own, but they always give me a horrified look and quickly say, "no.") Later today, Matt and I are stopping over at Pet's Discount during our run of errands to pick up a second tank and various mouse supplies to later put the males in when they're older. I really don't mind having several mice. This is my second run with owning a pair of mice and I'd rather see the numbers unexpectantly jump to nine instead of dropping down to one again.