[This happened Monday. Shut up, I've been busy.]

Goat is a cold-blooded killer. Cold. Blooded. He killed the office mouse.

I was in the back room working with one of our test machines when I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. It was the mouse scampering across the carpet. I use "scampering" loosely because he was actually pretty sluggish, but scampering seems like the kind of thing a mouse would do.

I was pretty surprised by this. How often do you eyeball the mouse in the house? Those things find the most obscure corners in which to hide, and generally stay there until you've gone away. I wonder what could have brought Mousy out right in front of me in the middle of the day?

I called Goat over so he could share in the oddity. "Bold little sucker, innit?" I said.

"Not anymore." [squish]

Goat squished Mousy under the toe of his shoe. Perhaps he's an old hand at mouse stomping because he seemed to know exactly how much pressure to use to crush the mouse without leaving mouse guts all over the place. Goat then scooped up Mousy's still-twitching body and threw him/her out into the snow.

Sniff, sniff.

Now we're going to need a new office mascot.

1. The landlord, who owns our little office building and the building next door, is currently engaged in an activity I'll call "the insurance nightmare." He's washing the sign for the used bookstore.

   There's a problem. The bottom of the sign is about ten feet off the ground and he doesn't have a tall enough ladder.

   His solution? To park in front of the sign and prop up his ladder on the roof of his truck.

   I like this guy, but I want to see him fall on his head just for being so foolish.

2. There's a mouse in my office. I left a bag of potato chips on my desk yesterday and this morning I found it with a ragged hole chewed through the side.

   Sweet. Not since the death of Midi (short for Middle Management Flunkie) the fish have we had an office mascot.