cancer – day 222

Uff da, the neuropathy has been worse with the cold weather (it’s been in the low 50s), especially in my feet. I hope it won’t get much worse when I go to South Dakota where it’s truly cold.

Last week sometime (I think) I uploaded a few family photos to my Facebook. But since my external hard drive had an unrecoverable crash in April, I lost a lot of my photos that were stored on it. So the only family photos I had handy were all pre-Audrey. Well, Sunday night my brother teased me on Facebook because our family portrait is out of date. So I went digging through everywhere I’ve ever had photos, and I found one on my MySpace of me holding Audrey when she was only a week or two old, so I added that to the Facebook family album.

Which got me looking at some of my other Facebook photos, like from dancing West Coast Swing for the filming of Love ‘N Dancing. The second weekend of that I got partnered with Edwin Li, and had just a blast hanging out that weekend, besides all the fun (and dreary repetitiveness) of the movie filming. So anyway, to finally get around to the story that all this Facebook photo stuff made me remember . . .

I was on a long road trip when I went to Albuquerque for the filming. I would work from whatever hotel during the day and drive to a new town in the evening, and I took the cats with me. The traveling duo. Well, in Albuquerque, they put us up at a nice desert resort, 5-star. I got a ground level room, which was cool because I had a huge patio to work from and it was just beautiful. However, the first day there, I walked in from the patio for a break, and the cats were being all freaky. And suddenly Mizzou bursts after a mouse that had been hiding under the footstool. It was crazy. Mizzou followed every zigzag and circle and kept right up with this Speedy Gonzalez. But, when the mouse disappeared behind the bedboard (a 2-inch gap), Mizzou could only keep watch again.

When they brought room service later, I asked the girl if mice were common out there because of being in the desert, to which she said they catch one once in a while. She sent two maintenance guys over, and they moved the bed and all the furniture away from the walls but didn’t find the mouse. I honestly wasn’t too concerned. I knew Mizzou would get it if it came back.

Which it did the next day. When I got back from the first day of filming that weekend, there was the mouse, dead on the floor by the footrest. And Mizzou looked very satisfied with himself, lying up on the bed like the king of the realm. Seoul, still a small kitten, is like his doting servant, lying nearby but respecting the space Mizzou commanded. Star-struck by the mouse killer.

So I put the mouse in a ziplock bag I had and put it in the garbage can, and went hot tubbing with Edwin and Benji and the two stars of the movie. A maintenance guy walked by, and I told him about the mouse and asked if they wanted me to do anything in particular with it. He said he’d send someone to get the mouse, and then I had to tell the whole story to everyone in the hot tub. And Tom, the lead actor, was all freaked out that there had been a mouse in my room. It was ridiculously funny, how nervous he looked at the prospect of a mouse running around in a hotel room. Now THAT was some fun storytelling, to get such a reaction from a listener!