A Day of Victories

It's not the things you can't remember, its the things you remember just a bit wrong....

As we headed out the door to fly overseas in late April I realized I had my house and car keys with me.  I recall where I was at that moment and that I commented to my wife that I had better leave them at home.  We both remembered that I put them down somewhere between the garage where I was setting our bags and the kitchen.  On our return they were nowhere to be found.

Since older people losing their car keys is short hand for losing their wits this has bothered us both to the point of a substantial bounty being placed on the keys.  Today my better half picked up a pair of jeans I had hung up, evidently when I switched to traveling clothes, and of course there in the pocket...

My next task of the day was to figure out why there was a dead mouse smell in my car.  Traveling might have something to do with this as well.  When you leave your vehicles in the garage for three weeks the little rodent deadbeats figure out they are a nice place to live.  We'd cleaned out a nest of chewed up paper from my wife's car.  Fortunately the occupant decided to climb into a trash can and expire.  So this was a smell I knew all too well.  As it turns out there is an alternate explanation.  Not a mouse.  Three mice.  

Pretty nasty but now cleaned and bleached.  Given their abilities to get in and out of places I have no idea why these guys decided to just stay in their nest of shredded insulation under the spare tire.  Could they not have just left?  Perhaps that stuff about not leaving animals in cars on 90 degree days has something to it.  Or maybe it was some sort of weird Rodent Death Cult.  Band Name of the day right there....

My assignment in payment for car key finding was dealing with the local Department of Motor Vehicles.  Where might be the tabs and registration paperwork we paid for online?  Not in our possession good bureaucrats.  I showed up prepared for a long tedious wait as the System decided whether it would hear my request and act.  I was prepared...brought some reading material.

In I went clutching, among other things the previous mouse chewed registration.  I was back out in under ten minutes and not only with the tabs but a nice tomato cage that was just sitting on the curb next to their sign.  True, the actual registration seems to be in some DMV-Postal Service limbo, having been mailed to us when we were out of town and sent to the wrong Mail Hold destination, but I could only take so much winning in one day.