Yesterday’s snowstorm in NYC was blown way out of proportion.  Yes, it snowed.  It snowed a lot.  But it was nothing when compared to the blizzard of 1996, where snow accumulation reached 30 inches in some areas.  The snowstorm we experienced yesterday was nowhere near a blizzard — the greatest amount of snow fell in the Great Kills neighborhood of Staten Island, topping the charts at 17 inches.  That’s really not so bad.  Public schools were closed, though, and the city university system shut down at 12 PM (several individual colleges chose to keep their doors closed all day).  As such, I didn’t have work and I couldn’t do much beside knit.  However, there was some excitement around 10 o’clock last night:

I’ve known that I’ve had mice for a few weeks now but, for the life of me, I could not figure out how to get rid of them. I have a cat, after all, so why should I be worrying about ridding of the mice? As it turns out, Dixon is a lousy mouse catcher:

He’s more interested in chasing them and playing with them rather than attacking or killing them. However, precisely because I have Dixon, I didn’t know what commercial techniques I could use to get this problem under control. Glue traps, spring traps, “zap” traps, and rodenticide all seemed extreme and inhumane. So when Alex caught the mouse last night in a jar, I didn’t know what to do. After some time on the Internet, the only advice I found was to drown it. I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. This thing was too small (and, admittedly, too cute) to be disposed of in such a manner. So, instead, I braved the elephants and released this little field mouse into the woods behind my house.

This post is for you, little mouse. I hope you survived the 10 or so inches of snow out there… or became dinner for a wet, hungry street cat.