Our bedroom faces onto a community garden, which has been an absolute blessing and curse combined. (Blessing: Waking up in New York City with a view of trees and hearing birds chirping early in the morning) (Curse: Trying to catch an afternoon nap while the homey’s or loud old men have one of their daily conventions / boxing fights / bong puffing sessions / yelling bouts right outside our bedroom)

The best thing that this garden has yet yielded, though, was this spectacular image. It was the first thing I saw when I woke up and that feeling of love stayed with me for the entire day…

After 28 days in the game, Rene got voted out of the Big Brother Africa house on Sunday.

We are all so proud of her and I know she’ll still go far.

Here’s her exit interview:

Never has being out of the country been such a bittersweet pill as right now. This past Sunday, my middle sister, Rene, was admitted to the Big Brother Africa house to compete over the next three months for the 1st prize of $200,000 (a whole lot of money here, but even more money if you live in Namibia!).

Not being able to be glued to the TV for 24hours a day, seven days a week and discuss the house-antics with other locals is super frustrating. That said, not having to deal with the fact that all of Africa has access to my sister’s body during ‘shower hour’! Ha ha!

What we’ve done from this side, however, is create a website for her (www.renemoolman.com) as well as a Facebook fan page. Please join the group and vote for Rene to stay in the house and compete for that grand first prize.

Big Sister will appreciate it!

In what has become an unplanned series, I hereby hopefully present you with the last of the Mighty Mouse Updates! Nina has gone back to her family and the house seems eerily quiet without the early-morning nuzzles and fur-dropping love everywhere. I do also enter our kitchen with less bravado than I did before when I knew that Nina was on the lookout.

As a last ‘Ra-Ra’ from her, however, we caught another mouse on the sticky trap under the stove last week Thursday. I came home from work, had a quick shower and just as I was about to blowdry my hair (we were on our way to attend an Indian wedding celebration in New Jersey, but more about that later), I heard the unmistakable ‘peeeep, peeep, peeeeeeeep’ of a mouse in distress coming from the kitchen. “Not again!” I thought and tiptoed my way into the unknown.

There, mouse-merized again, Nina sat in front of the stove, literally nose-to-nose with a mouse, stuck to a sticky trap. Its body was obscured by the stove, but in its escape efforts, the poor mouse had managed to maneuver itself into this rather unhappy situation. Only its face was visible outside the confines of our oversized American stove. This is when it happened…I mentally shut off. I retreated to the bathroom, plugged in my hairdryer and put so much body in my tresses that it was clear to anyone who saw me that I had blow-dried with a mission. I slinked into my wedding outfit, slipped on my sequined-gold bow-tie sandals and ran out the front door, slapping on lipstick as I went.

The minute I got in a cab, I called our landlord and, in my best girly voice, asked him to please ‘go take care of the sticky mouse situation’. When we got back from New Jersey at 2am. Nina was fast asleep and there was no sign of the mouse…or the sticky pad trap.

So I figured I’d better give Nina-the-Cat the due respect and let you all know that she indirectly did her job. She sniffed out the source of the mouse peeeeeeps and we managed to remove the mouse (stuck to a sticky mouse trap!) and (humanely, I believe) relieved it of its kitchen duties at our house.

What happened is that on the morning after my first night as cat-sitter, I walked into the kitchen to find Nina mouse-merized in front of the stove. From under the stove, the peeps I had heard the morning before were still there and now somewhat more desperate. Dammit, I thought. As I got down on my knees and peered under the stove, I saw a) a huge gross cockroach stuck to the sticky pad and b) a soft, furry and very fleshy mouse butt, also stuck to the sticky pad.

With a gentle scream I was up and out of the apartment and in front of the Super’s door (trust the mouse drama to go down on a week when John’s out of town, right?). After many clicks of the doorbell, the Super opened (keep in mind this was just after 7am) and I explained the situation to him. I don’t know if it was my hysteria or the fact that I was only partially dressed (!), but he offered to immediately come down and remove and kill the mouse. ‘No!’ I said – ‘Don’t kill it!’ at which he laughed and said in his heavy accent, “But vot else must aai dooo to a mouse zat is stuck on a paeeeed?”. I thought about it and told him that he could do whatever he wanted to, as long as he did it after I left home.

Needless to say, I did not have breakfast that morning and I did not see the fleshy mouse butt again. What I do know is that the mouse is probably running around with the hugest grin on its face, somewhere on the Great Lawn of Central Park, clutching a huge piece of Cheddar in its paws. Don’t you agree?

Many of our friends have had mice in their New York apartments and we’ve really been lucky in that the biggest issue we’ve had to deal with is the occasional (humongous) cockroach. We’ve devised ways to battle the yucky creatures and thus usually only end up with ‘roach carcasses displaying themselves in the middle of the kitchen floor first thing in the morning.

It’s a big city, there are many of us and I guess that you can’t have it all, right? I can handle the occasional roach.

What I was not prepared for was a mouse. Eeeek! After a recent picnic in Central Park we brought some leftover pizza home in it’s (American-sized) box. Considering the fact that it was a vegetarian and that I couldn’t fit it into our fridge, I figured that it would be okay to leave the box out on the kitchen counter for one night and reheat some pizza for dinner the next day. Bad idea…

The next day after our evening run, John was about to jump in the shower and I was going to reheat some pizza for our dinner before we had to head out to meet some friends. Unsuspecting me opened the pizza box and I still don’t know who had the bigger fright – me or the mouse! I remember thinking that it had a beautiful taupe-ey color, but that could also just be a result of the blur as the poor creature scrambled to get down as low as possibly, yet have enough space to still clear the side of the pizza box.

I screamed (like a girl!) and the movement of shutting the lid and moving it out the front door was completely seamless!

We have since found mouse droppings all over the kitchen, had an exterminator in (twice) and have put out mouse traps all over the kitchen – no yields yet. This morning after my run I was chopping banana to add to my cereal when I heard it…peeep, peeeeeep, peeep, peeeeep. It’s a distinctive sound and it infuriated me! So now it’s war. I have pulled all the stops and will not stop until I have had my revenge. (From what I’ve heard about the movie, you can call me Inglourious Basterd for now).

Meet Nina. Nina is my personal mouse-missile. The fluffball will be stayingwith us while her parents are out of town for the next ten days and I hope she enjoys the entertainment this household offers. (Yes, I do feel guilty, but dammit…mouse – go away!)