A house, a mouse and the New Year

Happy New Year!

We had quite the New Year! We didn't have any plans for the holiday until Dec. 26, when Marcus asked his friend from Manzanita if his beach house was available for New Year's. It was, and so we planned to bring a few friends and have a relaxing weekend at the house. Yay!

Well, just hours before we were to leave New Year's Eve our friends started dropping like flies. It was bizarre, really, but we were determined to have fun regardless!

New Year's Eve was fun. We snacked on horrifically unhealthy foods, toasted with Martinelli's and cranberry wine and watched the glowing ball... no really, there was some kind of glowing ball thingy hanging up here that looked a bit like the Times Square ball. (see picture)

London missed midnight (thankfully), but Mar and Sav celebrated with Dick Clark and Ryan Seacrest and a whole bunch of other Hollywood types. That was great! We also played Uno and Last Word (if you haven't heard of that game, check it out).

Well, we quickly discovered that we weren't alone in the home, after all. Savannah discovered little mousey poops scattered around the house. That was gross enough, but we had no idea when or how long the mouse had been at the house.

The weather was insane! The New Year's festivities on TV were interrupted by a weather bulletin informing us that the Coast was bracing for a big storm, accompanied by hurricane-force winds and flooding! Yippee! New Year's night brought some exciting wind and rain, that's for sure!

But waking up on Jan. 2 was the most exciting of all! Savannah had gotten out of bed in the early morning hours and was watching TV on the couch, when something caught her eye in her peripheral vision. She quickly discovered a little mousey friend, who had leaped from the couch (where she was laying) onto the coffee table in front of her. Somehow she didn't SCREAM, but quickly got Marcus, who was sleeping in the bedroom.

Marcus then tiptoed around like a ballerina, with a bat in his hand and feeling like the scene from "Ratatouille" could happen at any moment, where the roof comes crashing down and a thousand little mice run around. Gross!

We had decided we were going to leave a little early, but then that crappy weather we had seen on TV seemed to keep that from happening. Multiple highways were closed, and others were snow- and ice-covered. It would have been OK, except we only had one tire chain, since it was a casualty in the big "Arctic Blast" of 08.

Now, at 7:17 p.m. Jan. 2, we're sitting at the computer, checking our Facebooks and email, and hoping we can catch that mouse before he cooks us a souffle.