The Henpecked Husbands Meeting

"What the hell is this?" my husband demanded one day, slapping a piece of paper in front of me. He'd brought it back from our kids' nursery school. It was all in Japanese except for the title. WELCOME ALL YURI GUMI FATHERS TO A HENPECKED HUSBANDS' MEETING! it stated in English. Japanese nursery schools name the various school years after flowers, and our five-year-old was in yuri gumi, the 'lily group.'

"It's from Ayaka's dad," I said, reading it. "He says he wants to start a fathers' group. He's proposing a get-together of all the yuri gumi dads."

My husband groaned, not being a terribly social animal. The school organized enough events as it was; the last thing we needed was an extra activity organized by the other parents.

The nursery school where we sent our kids was for children whose mothers and fathers both worked. We both knew and liked a lot of the parents there, including Ayaka's, but we found ourselves overwhelmed by the number of extracurricular activities parents were expected to attend in Japan. Over the course of a year, you were expected to attend all of the following: New Year's parties, classroom observations, parent-teacher meetings (even for nursery school children), summer festivals, sports days (all-day events of vast importance), school concerts and recitals, Christmas parties -- and more. And I really do mean more, too. There were weed-picking days, rice-pounding ceremonies, potato pot suppers, girls' and boys' day events, fund-raising and recycling get-togethers, and a host of other 'volunteer' activities.

A Japanese friend of ours went to live in Cambridge for a year with her husband, a visiting scholar, and their fifteen-year-old son, who has Downs syndrome. She went to every event her son's school put on and was amazed at how few there were and how poorly they were attended by the other parents. When she and her family were due to leave, the entire teaching staff came out to see her off. They all hugged her, telling her they had never had a student with such a dedicated, cooperative parent. "They actually had tears in their eyes," she reported, bemused. "And I only turned up to three or four events and made a few dozen cupcakes!"

Although we exerted ourselves far more than we wanted to at our kids' schools, I'm afraid we must have left the opposite impression in Japan. We got into big trouble when our eldest was one year old and we failed to show up at her nursery school's sports day and the summer festival. We didn't realize attendance was virtually mandatory.

"I don't really have to go to this, do I?" my husband whined now.

"I go to all the mothers' meetings," I countered. "Somebody has to."

"But this is just a bunch of fathers--"

"Remember: I had to do the weed pulling and the curtain laundering," I pointed out. "And it'll be good for you to meet the other fathers. You guys hardly ever see each other." This was true: most of us mothers saw each other when we picked up our kids or at the supermarket. We talked a lot.

"I've got nothing in common with these guys!"

I sighed. "You all work full-time, your wives all work, you have kids who attend the same school, you're tired all the time--"

"But I can't speak Japanese!"

"You can speak enough for something like this!"

"This is just so stupid," he fumed. "What are we going to talk about?"

"Do what we Moms do. We talk about our kids."

He looked incredulous. "For three straight hours?" From nine to midnight was written on the flier.

"Three hours probably wouldn't be enough time for us."

I knew little Ayaka's mother pretty well, so the next time I saw her, I mentioned her husband's proposed fathers' meeting. She rolled her eyes and snorted. "Henpecked husbands! Where does he get off calling himself henpecked? I told him not to call it that!"

A few of the other mothers objected to henpecked too, when they found out what it meant.

"I work full time," one of them sighed. "I get up at six in the morning and leave the house at seven thirty and I don't get back until twelve hours later. Plus I do all the laundry, most of the shopping -- and I clean the toilets. If my husband thinks he's henpecked, what am I -- a slave?"

All week long, my husband moaned and fretted about the Henpecked Husbands Meeting. So did Ayaka's mother, who bitterly resented her husband for considering himself henpecked. Given the fact that all the women in our small group worked as hard -- or harder, in some cases -- than our husbands, it did seem provoking that any of them should consider themselves hard done by.

My husband eagerly embraced this as an argument against going to the meeting. "It's sexist! I don't want to get together with a lot of guys who're just going to whine about their wives."

Ayaka's father smiled and shrugged on the one occasion I saw him when I mentioned his use of henpecked. "It's just a joke," he told me. "Mainly, I'd just like to meet the other fathers."

On the night of the Henpecked Husbands Meeting, my husband dragged his feet every inch of the way, leaving the house as late as he possibly could, looking put upon and miserable. The entire time he was gone, I pictured him sulking over his beer, furtively peeking at his watch, itching to go home.

He got back very late that night. "Was it awful?" I asked nervously.

He shook his head. "No. It was brilliant and I had a great time. They're all really nice guys."

I was relieved -- and frankly amazed. "What did you talk about?"

My husband smiled. "We talked about our kids. For three straight hours."

Joining The Club

The couple downstairs from us have just had a baby.

"It's great," the proud father said. "He doesn't cry at all."

The baby was all of one day old and it was all I could do not to smile. "That'll come," I couldn't help saying.

"No, I don't think it will," our neighbor contradicted. "I think it's just his nature. He's very placid."

Bless him. I said the exact same thing myself once and I vaguely remember being infuriated by the amused and knowing looks people gave me. People who had real, seasoned children instead of newborn babies.

When you decide to have a baby, you join one of the biggest clubs in the world. For most of us new members, learning how to be parents is a fiddly, exhausting business with a steep learning curve. Half the world seems to know how to do it better, seems more efficient, secure and successful. And they're just itching to tell you all about it, too.

When I look back on our first day with a new baby, I marvel at the extent of our ignorance. I recall how we longed to recognized as full-fledged members of the club. To be appreciated for our efforts and applauded for choosing the path we had taken. So I congratulated our neighbor and I hope I didn't look too cynical at what he said about his baby having a placid nature.

We've come almost full circle now, my husband and I: we have just celebrated our eldest's 17th birthday. Cliche that it is, the past seventeen years have gone by so fast, we can hardly get over it. We both clearly remember when we were expecting her -- the sense of joy and anticipation.

Our washing machine broke down only a week before our daughter was due, and we were anxious to get it fixed in time. The repairman was a dour fellow who did his job well. "That's done then," he told us, washing his hands. "Ought to work fine now."

We were relieved to hear this and we told him so. "I guess it's obvious we're having a baby," my husband said proudly as I stood there next to him, positively sumoesque.

The man glanced at me briefly and nodded. "You're in for it," he muttered darkly.

"You have children, then?" my husband asked, despite himself.

"Oh aye," said the man. "Teenagers. And I wish they'd never been born."

He said this with such conviction that we were stunned. We didn't get it: we couldn't wait to be parents, couldn't wait to hold our new baby in our arms and get on with the business of raising her. Why were so many parents so negative about their children? Every day we heard parents snapping at their children in supermarkets, yelling at them on the streets. The people who lived just behind us, an otherwise pleasant couple, were forever screaming at their toddlers: two-year-old twins. Why?

In another couple of years, we were beginning to understand why. Kids don't necessarily do what you tell them to do no matter how well you phrase it. We found ourselves sounding a lot like our neighbors and had even come to respect them for their admirable patience. One feisty toddler can be a headache a minute when you're trying to mow the lawn: two in one go doesn't bear thinking about. And seventeen years after our repairman's passionate and negative declaration, we have come to understand what he must have been wrestling with too. We've been there, and it isn't pretty. No doubt we have more to come, too, as our youngest wades her way through adolescent angst, and all we can do is support each other through it and hope for the best. What else can we do?

No matter how frustrated we get, though, we won't let on to our neighbors. They've just joined the club and they need all the encouragement they can get.

Passing It On

One night my husband came home fuming. He had been changing trains in Nishifunabashi Station as usual, and had met another foreigner.

"Where are you from?" the fellow foreigner had asked, and my poor unsuspecting husband went and told him.

"British?" the foreigner spat out, in an indisputably American accent. "You mean English?"

My husband nodded.

"Well, I'm Irish. We hate you guys."

Having already had a rough day, my good husband couldn't let this go. "Why?"

"Oh, you know," the American said, gesturing vaguely. "For all that stuff you did."

For what it is worth, my husband was born in 1960 and this man admitted that he was a third generation American.

Now I suspect that this man was exceptional in his narrow-mindedness; that he too may have had a bad day and just wanted to take it out on somebody. But his attitude, though perhaps extreme, is not uncommon in America.

I will never forget the first time I heard an uncle of mine tell another uncle about my husband, whom he had just met. "He's English," I clearly heard him say, "but he's real nice."

Catch that use of 'but'?

One of the legacies passed on from generation to generation in my mother's family was a mistrust of the English. Not the British, the English. This feeling was vague and complex and had many roots, but it was very much a presence. We all knew that the English were elitest. That they had a class system and snubbed people they deemed inferior. They were opportunistic and greedy too, having violated the Union's blockade of Southern ports during the Civil War, thus actively aiding and abetting the South to export their sinful, slavery-tainted cotton. (We were largely Unionists in my family and tried to forget the few rebels in our background.) The English, so the story went, had hired Germans to fight us during the American Revolution, not wanting to sully their own hands. They had done everything in their power to stir up hostile Indians against us; they owned the Kentucky mines that we Welsh, Irish, and Scots had toiled, bled, and even died in. They made their children take difficult tests at an excessively early age and moreover, they didn't even raise them, entirely trusting to nannies and other menials to do their dirty work. Besides, they ate with fish forks and knives; they had a queen, and they put on airs.

It was only after I started working at a British company in Tokyo that I saw how wrong some of these assumptions had been. Plenty of my co-workers -- people we would have identified as English -- were in fact of Irish or other extraction. No one I ever met admitted to being raised by a nanny, and those with poncey, elitist ways were openly mocked. When Prince Charles came to open our school with the soon-to-be Japanese crown prince, those in management were hard put to find any junior staff members to join the welcoming crowd. Big deal seemed to be the prevailing attitude.

Having lived in the U.K. for almost eight years, I have seen for myself that the image many Americans have formed about the British, and the English in particular, is little more than a silly stereotype no more to be trusted than the image many people have of us Americans as ignorant, xenophobic loudmouths. And yet this attitude against the English persists, and people are only too eager to have their prejudices reinforced.

"Where's the place Braveheart happened?" an American tourist in Scotland once asked me. "We want to go visit it."

"You'll have to go back to California," I told him. "Braveheart was pretty much a Hollywood fiction. It's a hodge-podge of things that sort-of happened and a lot of things that didn't."

He didn't believe me. His ancestors were Scotch-Irish too, and like me, he'd been raised to think that the English were a bunch of poncey elitists just itching to subjugate, loot, and rule the world. He cited the British ship owners who benefited from the slave trade, the ships that broke through the blockade to purchase Southern cotton, the English who sent thousands of Irish men and women to work as slaves in the Caribbean.

Hollywood has been quick to capitalize on anti-English sentiment, and people accept what they see in the movies as the gospel truth. Even my kids' classmates point to Braveheart as an example of English cruelty when what it really shows is the power of Hollywood and the tenacity of our own prejudice.

This is not to say that the English haven't done plenty of bad things historically. Of course they have, as have so many countries. But just as I resent the stereotypes held against Americans, I find these prejudices against the English exasperating and baffling. It is as though England's past empire has made the English a safe target for those of us who are looking for others to bash.

We can pass on so much to our children. Knowledge, a love of reading or sports or collecting, family stories, any number of useful tips and ideas. We can and should tell them about history, too; the great wrongs that have been perpetrated in this world should never be forgotten. But why do we choose to pass on our hatred and prejudices? Why is it not possible to discuss the events of history without encouraging our children and grandchildren to nurture the same grievances our ancestors had?

I told the American tourist something I had just learned: that it was a handful of Englishmen and women who started the movement against the slave trade. That a town of newly-freed slaves was named after one of them in Jamaica, that these people dedicated most of their lives to the abolition of slavery.

But he was too busy writing down Bannockburn to listen.

Wasp Nest

One summer when we were living in Japan, we realized we had a wasp nest in our attic, just over the front door.

At first, there had just been the odd scout. Live and let live, we said to each other. The odd wasp won't hurt us. Our house was pretty much Grand Central Station for insects and other invertebrates, after all: we had sowbugs, cockroaches, earwigs, mosquitoes, centipedes, spiders, daddy long legs, and a variety of pet -- and free range -- crickets. But over the course of weeks, that scout found a few buddies and pretty soon we were seeing a dozen wasps a minute. I got out my dictionary, then the yellow pages, and found a couple of numbers for exterminators. But no one answered at the first place I called, and the people at the second company were rude and unhelpful. We put off doing anything about the wasps until my husband, taking in the laundry one evening, got stung on the hand. His fingers and knuckles swelled up so badly it looked like he was wearing a boxing glove. "Don't get stung again," the doctor advised him.

I called the first exterminator again and got a recorded message. I hate recorded messages even in English-speaking countries, but in Japan they gave me cold sweats. Nevertheless, I did the necessary and left my message. I'll bet they had a field day with it when they played back the tape: Hello. I live in Abiko. There is a wasp nest over our front door, inside the, um, attic. We hope you will be able to get rid of it. As soon as possible. Please. Like an idiot, I hung up before giving them our number and had to call back.

A week passed and the exterminators did not call us back. As I was getting more and more nervous about one of the kids getting stung, I decided to take matters into my own hands. My husband could not do it given his allergy; clearly, I was going to have to figure something out and do it myself.

"You've got to get rid of the queen," a friend at work told me. "If the queen is there, no matter what you do, you'll still have wasps."

"Wait for the exterminator to call you back," another friend advised. "You'll get stung if you do it yourself, and it's messy, nasty work."

But I am nothing if not pig-headed, and besides, I liked the idea of saving us the hefty extermination fee. I knew where the hole was; I figured if I blocked it up, no wasps could get in and I would starve the queen.

But first, I had a cunning plan: I would take out as many soldiers as I could. This way I could gain access to the entry hole without fear of being swarmed while I plugged it up.

I had noticed that the wasps became active at an early hour. Opening the sliding glass door at five o'clock in the morning, I stood on a table, switched on the vacuum cleaner, and waited. Soon, an eager wasp soldier came flying towards the nest. Holding the vacuum cleaner nozzle aloft, I put it up against the entry point. The wasp was sucked right into the vacuum cleaner. Banzai!

"Is it working?" my husband asked dubiously from the safety of our bedroom.

"Yes!" I shouted back. "They're going for it!"

That first wasp was followed by another, then another, then another. All of them dived obligingly into my nozzle without the slightest hesitation.

Five minutes passed and still the wasps came in a long, steady procession. One of our neighbors, walking past in a business suit, glanced at me in amazement as I stood there shouldering my nozzle, waiting for the soldiers to start thinning out.

But they didn't.

I think I spent an hour, all told, sucking up wasps. My back ached; my arms and shoulders were on fire, and still the wasps came, one after another, to tumble into the Great Unknown of my nozzle. If I hadn't finally given up, I do believe I would be there still. One thing I can promise you is that there are an awful lot of wasps in the world.

As I left for work a few hours later, they were still lining up to get into our attic. And we needed a new vacuum cleaner.

A Bunch Of Reasons I Have Trouble Getting Published

My fellow bloggers Merry and Angelique (who also posts on Breaking the Mirror) have tagged me for one of those Six Weird Things memes.

Now, I have been hesitating about posting another one of these weirdness memes. Not because I'm ashamed of being weird. No, I'm a woman who embraces her inner weirdness and greatly admires others who do, like my blogging pal Ello, who can make me laugh so hard I spill beverages on my keyboard. And it isn't because I don't have enough weird stuff to post, either; if anything, I'm spoiled for choices. No, my reasons for taking my time over this post are quite the contrary: This blog is already so much about me that even a self-absorbed person like myself has to take a step back and worry about overload.

So, because I'm really not quite as self-absorbed as I come off in this blog (almost, but still not quite), I want to do something a little different here. I have picked, at random, a number of blogs whose writers fill me with awe, and I've found some way to link them all to my own weird attributes. Some of these blogs you will be familiar with, some you may not. But I firmly believe that it is talent like this that has kept me from getting published. (See how deftly I manage to whip it around to me, me, me? That's a special skill for sure, but is it recognized? Is it rewarded?)

If you don't see your name here, by the way, that does NOT mean that I don't envy you and wish you'd stop writing so well. It means that I've got repetitive stress issues, and I don't want to bring down Blogger. I'm betting I'll be doing more of these weirdness posts -- if you've got it, flaunt it, right? -- and I'll get to you eventually,whether you like it or not.

1) I come from a fanatically cat-loving family. If anyone can top our highest number (21, one incredible summer), feel free and call me on this. Both of my parents brought home stray cats, as does the gifted and generous Kanani, even my father, who was allergic to cats, as is my dog-owning, cat-loving blogging pal Katie Alender, who has also written a YA novel that sounds terrific, as has Danette, who might or might not like cats, but is another fine writer. (Confusing paragraph, yes, but I had to pack a lot in there.)

Eventually we became known as the weird people who would take anybody's cats and people started dumping their spare cats at our house. We invariably took them in and fed them. We were rather poor, and my parents refused to take them to the veterinarian, so my sisters and I pooled our babysitting money and started getting them fixed. When we grew up and got boyfriends, the one question always asked was Does he like cats? Race, religion, occupation and intelligence were pretty much secondary issues, but a no answer to the cat question was unsupportable. Cat lovers with allergies were sorely pitied; Katie, I feel your pain.

2) I can eat just about anything as long as it isn't of animal origin, unlike my wonderful friend and fellow blogger Carolie, who is also a talented and creative cook who once ran her own restaurant, worked as a wardrobe master for the circus, and writes incredibly interesting posts and letters.

3) I am a Californian living in Scotland, raising kids who are a weird hybrid of cultures. Sam is my counterpart: a Scot living in California, raising kids who I'm guessing call her Mom. Sam has a huge following, which is well deserved. If she wrote a book, I would wait in line to buy it; the library is great, but you have to return the books you borrow and I wouldn't want to return hers. Her writing is so good and so utterly zany, it defies description. If you're a struggling writer hoping to publish, you'll be as sick with envy as I am every time I read her posts.

4) Since I'm a Californian living in Scotland, I'm obviously an expatriate, as are the marvelously talented Christine Eldin, Kim and Mr Gorilla Bananas (the only gorilla on my blogroll, to my knowledge), and the aforementioned Carolie and Sam. Actually, I suspect that Mr Bananas lives in the U.K., but I'm betting from his writing that he has been an expatriate. And besides, a gorilla living in the human world is arguably an expatriate wherever he goes. If you think you can write, please go and look at his blog -- not that he needs any more readers. Kim, who is the reason I started a blog in the first place, has a unique ability to suffer fools: he talked me through all the technical stuff, and we're talking serious foolishness here. He doesn't need any more readers either, but I am still honor-bound to direct you to his blog. Before I started reading blogs like these, I used to think I could write too. A former short-term expatriate and a depressingly confidence-tapping fine writer is Susan Sandmore, who can also find sharks' teeth and decide when she is going to give birth. Whoever says we only get one great gift in life ought to go read her blog; I reckon she's been given someone else's share. If she weren't so nice and amazingly generous with her spot-on critiques, I'd mind a lot more.

5) I grew up with rather old-fashioned, religious parents, as did Carole, a fellow hick who happens to write deeply moving, honest, and reflective posts. In fact, I come from a long line of religious fanatics, including lay preachers, missionaries, and random religious nutters, and I long to talk with Carole about this some day, if she manages to visit Scotland while we're still here. A background like ours pretty much shapes your life, like it or not, and I find that I readily bond with others who've had similar upbringings. My parents were also serious hoarders, like Kathie's parents. Until I found Kathie's blog, I assumed I was the only one who had parents like this. It is one thing to have hoarding parents, of course; it is quite another to be able to write about them with humor and compassion. Kathie's post about hoarding is so good that I go back to read it whenever I need a lift, and it never disappoints.

6) John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces is one of my favorite books, something I share with Kara, another fine writer. Not that I begrudge her. Not that I begrudge any of you; my only question is Why do there have to be so many of you?

Risk

My husband and I went hiking along the river the other day. I'm a terrible klutz who can trip over her own shadow, so I tend not to veer off the trail. And yet, perversely, when I see a precipitous path off a well-marked trail, part of me longs to pursue it. At one point the rather tame trail we were on branched into two. One prong was clearly marked DANGER -- TAKE CARE, as it ran along a precipitous slab of sandstone that jutted out over the river, while the other ran between the safer side of the stone and a grove of conifers.

We took the safer path, but a tiny part of me wanted to try the hard one -- for the challenge, the sheer exhileration you get from taking your life in your hands. And it made me remember Devil's Lake in Wisconsin.

Almost seven years ago, on our eldest daughter's tenth birthday, I decided to swim across Devil's Lake. We were traveling across the States at the time, stopping to visit friends and relatives, and on our daughter's birthday we happened to be in Wisconsin visiting my best friend from fourth grade.

For those of you who haven't had the privilege of experiencing long-distance car travel with children, let me assure you that while it has its moments, some of them last a little too long. By the time we hit Wisconsin, my stress levels were elevated and I desperately needed to let off steam. As we ate our picnic by the side of the lake, I sized it up. It looked to be about a mile across, and as I have swum several miles in one go, I knew I could easily swim across, then swim back.

"Anyone want to swim across?" I asked a good hour after our picnic finished.

Nobody did.

I tested the water, and it was a little chilly, but I knew that was no problem. For a long distance swim, cold water is what you're after; warm water will make you overheat in no time.

"Well, I'm going to give it a go." My friends had seen swimmers in the lake before; they knew it was safe. It was the middle of May, and no one else was swimming in it, but the sight of that expanse of glittering water was too much for me: I had to try it.

I stripped down to my swimsuit and put my goggles around my neck. "Okay -- see you all later!"

God, the water was cold. I swam for about ten minutes, watching as my friends and family on the shore grew more and more distant. Then I saw my husband wade into the lake and swim after me. "If you're determined to do this, I might as well do it with you."

We swam side by side. It was a beautifully warm day with starched popcorn clouds in a pale blue sky, but by the time we got to the middle of the lake, I had made a discovery: the water was the temperature of newly melted ice and I could not feel my feet.

"Can you feel your feet?" I called out to my husband.

"No," he shouted. "Because it's f***ing cold!"

"Just keep swimming, I guess," I managed.

"Mmm."

And so we did. Our friends and children were specks on the distant shore; we could no longer even tell if they were waving. We swam and we swam and we swam, and when I looked ahead, I could not see that the opposite shore was growing any closer.

In retrospect, it could not have taken us over two hours to get across -- possibly it was less. But in my mind's eye, I am swimming there even now. At one point, I thought that we would never reach the other side. My arms and legs, vainly struggling against the water, seemed not to propel me forward. I kept my eyes on my husband, who like me was working hard to keep up a steady, sustainable pace, and I had the horrible thought that we would both die, on our daughter's tenth birthday, frozen in the middle of a Wisconsin lake because of my foolishness.

And then to my amazement, the opposite shore grew closer, and as it did, the water grew shallower and warmer until we could see rocks and algae underneath. Our feet found the rocky bottom and clumsily we began to wade to the shore. I felt remarkably uncoordinated and confused; later I realized that this was because of hypothermia.

A man on the shore watched us in amazement as we stumbled towards him. "Where did you come from?" he asked.

We pointed across the lake and his jaw dropped. "Not from over there?" he enquired, pointing to the adjoining beach. We shook our heads.

"There were people out there in wet suits yesterday," he told us. "The lake only just thawed last week."

Jesus, Joseph and Mary, we'd had no idea.

The man drove us back to the other side in his SUV. I feebly suggested that we could swim back after a rest, but my husband wisely nixed this.

"So where are you guys from?" the man asked us.

"Well, I'm from California."

There was a long, pregnant silence during which I distinctly heard his eyes roll. I'm willing to bet that this story has made the rounds in Wisconsin, so if you're from there and you happen to have heard about this, we're the idiots who swam across Devil's Lake the day after it thawed.

There's a lesson in this of course. Life is all about risk. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn't swim across Devil's Lake in the middle of May. But not every experience in life can be vetted, approached cautiously, then rejected for its potential danger. Sometimes you're going to just jump right in and give it a go -- and find yourself wishing with all your heart that you'd let discretion be the better part of valor.

But you can't give up; you really can't. You might just make it to the other side.

Rising Blogger Award (And Other Gifts)

Lately I spend so much of my time reading and filing away rejection letters that when something like this happens the first thing I do is check to make sure that it isn't a scam or a cruel joke. And folks, this award is for real! It is also one of several surprises I received on Friday, an unusually auspicious day for some reason.

In the late morning, I got a dead rat, delivered fresh to my doorstep by my faithful, hard-working cat. In the post, were two nice letters, one from Action Aid and the other from Locks of Love, thanking me for my recent efforts on their behalf. Two hours later, a freshly-killed vole, again from my cat, then a very supportive and encouraging rejection e-mail, followed by a long stretch of nothing, and then this wonderful Rising Blogger award. No sooner had I received that than I heard my cat's hunting call again, and lo and behold, she'd brought me a nice juicy mouse.

I feel so loved.