mousing improvising

i've been really looking forward to today, the chance to improvise with my newly working rhodes piano (must remember to stop calling it a fender rhodes, they'd dropped the fender part of the name by the time they made mine)...

i got the room ready and then made some food for myself and then started improvising around 5... already getting dark...

it's rendering right now, turned out to be pretty long, 15 minutes or so, but that doesn't really surprise me, it's been a couple of months since my rhodes has been part of the weekly improvisations and i had a lot to say...

mostly spoken voice part, although sung vocals did creep in towards the end...

so i was editing it in cubase, putting on a hint of reverb and cutting the beginning and ends right when i saw a small shape scurry across my room...

really freaked me out...

a little later i saw this tiny mouse (i hope) climbing up a speaker lead to my shelves...

i didn't know i was scared of mice before this point, but it turns out i am...

so i shut down my computer and moved a few bits of furniture so i could get at the shelving and then for a tense hour or so (it could have been 30 minutes... my sense of time went) i was shining lights at it, placing cookie crumbs into a clear plastic box as bait, while it hid behind two piles of books on one particular shelf, occasionally poking it's tiny head out and looking at me...

the cookie crumbs were no good, it knew it was a trap, another clear plastic box had once been a minidisk store and that got pressed into service, and it had a lid...

it was looking good, mousy was venturing in there sniffing about... i chose my moment to strike and close the box but both times i tried it i was too slow..

the second time i think i caught it's tail as it eeked in pain before running back behind the books...

by this time i was gradually removing the books one by one, so that it would have nowhere to hide and would have to come out and be caught, i had no real idea how i was going to catch it mind you, the plastic boxes weren't doing the trick and i didn't want to touch it...

which led finally to it climbing on top of one of the few books left and staring at me, i was clicking my fingers at it to make it scurry back which had worked before but this time it made a run for it and leapt off the shelf...

making me scream a little...

so i went back to dealing with the improvisation, (which is now uploading to googlevideo), but was bothered every now and then by the sound of the mouse, rooting about... so i did what i should have done straight away... i went and found balthazara and sat her down in my room, gave her a little love and then got on with things...

once i'd dealt with the improvisation i looked up and balthazara had been feigning laziness but had just leapt up and chased into a corner of the room, seeing her prey...

and that's where she still is now, still not triumphant but now the mouse knows who else lives in this house and will hopefully go and tell all its little mousy friends to not return, wishful thinking there but it was a stressful hour or so and i think i deserve a little indulgence...

x