Ok, just in case you’re curious – this is what a frostbitten ear looks like a week after it was frozen and thawed. See the darker colour on the lower portion of the lobe? That’s the frostbitten part. I don’t know if it’ll ever look or feel normal again. Despite having lived in frozen Ottawa all my life, this is my first experience with frostbite. I’m not blaming myself, or the Rideau Canal, or the handknit hat – I’m blaming the silver earring. Just so ya know.

I still think the strangest thing is that I didn’t even notice it was frostbitten until the next day. I thought frostbite was supposed to hurt like hell.

I got home from work yesterday and couldn’t find Frankie anywhere! I figured he must have escaped from the aquarium and then carefully replaced the weighted lid on top of it.

“What a smart mouse,” I thought to myself, “And tidy too.”

I opened up the aquarium to remove the humane trap from it, and discovered it was unbearably hot in the aquarium. The food I had put out for him in the morning had rotted already because of the steamy conditions. I began to think maybe it was best that Frankie had escaped, otherwise he might have suffocated or roasted in there.

But then I saw a flicker of movement! Frankie was back in the humane trap!

And then everything became crystal-clear to me. Suddenly I knew what I had to do. It was inhumane to keep Frankie in a hot aquarium, and inhumane to keep him in a humane trap. It was a lovely warm evening in Ottawa, unusually warm for January, with several warm days forecast. My blogger friends were right – the humane thing to do was to free Frankie. He could survive outside for a couple of days in the above-zero temperatures while searching out alternative accommodations.

Frankie and Sam the dog and I went out to the park across the street. I opened up the trap and Frankie hopped out. He ran through the footprints in the snow, and each footprint began to look like mountains and valleys as he scaled one side and slid down the other. He followed the footprints all the way home. Then I discreetly averted my eyes so I wouldn’t see if he snuck back in.

Here are a few interesting facts about mice:

• They prefer chocolate to cheese
• The average lifespan is about 3 months
• Unlike the teeth of other mammals, the front incisors of rodents never stop growing. In fact, continuously growing front teeth is a trait shared by all rodents from the tiniest mouse to the largest capybara. By observing captive mice and rats who have nothing to gnaw upon, its been found that these incisors can grow up to five inches per year.
• A mouse can jump down 12 feet without injury. What’s more, mice have a 12 inch vertical jump.
• To this day some people believe that fried mice or mouse pie is a cure for bedwetting!
• The female mouse ovulates every other day
• A pair of mice can have 135+ children in a year! During that time, their children can also start multiplying in similar numbers! Because of the rapid breeding capabilities, scientists are able to study heredity patterns of several generations in only a few years. It would take hundreds of years to study as many generations of people.
• Mice do not need any water; they can convert solid food into water through a chemical process.

UPDATE – the landlord was about to come over and ‘dispose’ of the mouse I captured in the humane trap. It just seemed so wrong to capture him humanely and then allow someone to drown him. I tried to release him outside but I couldn’t figure out how to open the trap, and I also thought he might be condemned to die a frosty death. Eventually, with much input from my softer-hearted friends, I decided to adopt him, name him Frankie, and let him live in a spare aquarium until the springtime – then I’ll release him outside. Eventually I figured out how to free him from the trap. Now he spends all his time jumping up and down, trying to figure out how to escape from the aquarium. Here are a couple of really bad photos – the first one is Frankie exiting the humane trap and entering the big aquarium world. The second one is Early Exploration of the New World.

Well…Christmas is over, New Years is done, the houseguests have left, and I’m almost finished tidying the whole mess away.

I haven’t been feeling well – some kind of mild stomach virus that lasts over a week – so I haven’t had much energy to do anything very interesting.

However, I did put on my party pants and go out on New Years Eve – to a senior citizens’ home. I took photos of the residents celebrating New Years. They really know how to ring in the new year too – they move all the clocks ahead, so they’re doing the big countdown at 8:15 instead of midnight. That way they can party and celebrate and still be in bed by 9:00. I thought it was a brilliant idea, especially since I was feeling about 85 years old myself that night. Besides, some of these people have rung in the new year a hundred times already, so they must know what they’re doing by now.

I’m making the residents a video of the photos I took, using software called Memories on TV. It lets me burn my photos to a CD or DVD (a slide show with panning, zooming and cool effects, and set to music – in this case, Auld Lang Syne), which can be watched on TV. I’ve made a few now, and people seem to really like them.