Of mice and men

I came home this afternoon to find the resident fix-it man sitting on the porch surrounded by the bright-yellow entrails of a broken tape measure doomed to retract no more. "It broke," he said. "I tried to fix it." Note the past tense. The eternal optimist always thinks broken things can be fixed, and they probably can, but at some point you have to wonder whether the fix is worth the time it takes.

So we've added "tape measure" to the shopping list, but the time he spent taking it apart was not wasted: while he was sitting out there fiddling with it, he killed a mouse. How? "I threw my boot at it," he said. Not the most orthodox method of mouse-killing, but effective nevertheless.

It was one small step for man--but we'll never know just how small without a functioning tape measure.