There are friends and there are mouse poo friends. Mouse poo friends are forever, bonded through common experience and nausea. 

It all started innocently enough. Travis and I went to Wisconsin to help my best college friend with some fixes to her house. If I’m being honest, this is a LONG overdue repayment of a favor. Twenty-four years ago, Laura spent a couple days at my tiny townhouse helping me paint and stencil around the top of the nursery in preparation for the arrival of Trent. It was a homemade stencil that Travis had cut out of manila folders to match the Winnie the Pooh border that I had put above the chair rail. In retrospect, we should have put the stencil around the chair rail and the border around the ceiling because Trent peeled off any border that he could reach from his crib, ruining the overall effect. That kid!!! Eventually, I pulled the border off the whole room, but that stencil remained. 

Okay, so it takes a while for me to repay my favors, but I never forgot Laura standing on chairs to help me dab paint a stencil, while the Manila folders got gooey and damp from the paint. Fortunately, Laura didn’t need a stencil. She needed new ceiling tiles to replace falling, broken, stained old ones. Well, that’s what the unskilled labor worked on (Laura and me). Travis ran some electric to add an outlet and ran some cable line, since the cable was running down the wall from under the ceiling tile. It was functional, but not pretty. Travis also needed to install a new faucet for Ma P (Laura’s mom) and caulk around the kitchen sink. 

The track for the ceiling tiles was screwed directly into the floor joists, which didn’t allow for any play to remove the old tiles. We had two choices. We could click off the top of the track to remove the old tiles and hope that the track would click back into place, or we could punch through the old tiles and bust them out. We chose the latter, because it seemed like less work and more fun. Travis helped us with the ceiling for a little while, until our usual banter teetered on the edge of bickering. It turns out even unskilled labor can use a tape measure and cut ceiling tiles to fit and holes for recessed lights. Laura had a front row seat to the Trav and Jo show as we steadily moved along the room, replacing tiles. As we came to the last row of tiles, we were met with a steady flow of mouse poo. The first tile covered in poo caught us unaware, but after that, we busted them and jumped out of the way, although we couldn’t completely clear the rain of poo, we avoided most of it. Apparently, when Laura bought the house, there was a bit of a mouse problem. Her cat kindly brought his kills to Laura’s bed each night to present them as gifts. To avoid more gifts, Laura and Pa P set traps until there were no more presentations from the cat. 

We completed nearly all of the family room on Saturday, which left only the hall area for Sunday. I felt ready to tackle a new round of demolition Sunday in my only clean clothes left after the mouse poo extravaganza. The poo was isolated in the farthest corner from the hall area, so we figured that we were done with poo. Laura started busting up tiles in one corner of our new area, and I in the opposite corner. I picked poorly. I punched a hole in my very first hall tile, got a firm hand hold in the hole, and pulled it down, effectively creating a chute for the mother load of mouse poo that cascaded upon me from that tile. It was like showering in poo. At the time, I called it an avalanche and Laura called it a waterfall, but I think cascade fits best. We were tinkering in the amateurs in the family room. This corner was the mouse party house, before the great mouse demise. I actually thought I might throw up. Later, I found mouse poo in my bra. Since I couldn’t seem to manage my nausea, Laura got in on the action, also enjoying the next cascade of poo. We took a break so we could wash my clothes from the previous day, so I would have something to wear home that, preferably, wasn’t exposed to mouse poo. 

We tiled and cleaned up the space and ourselves, and enjoyed a celebratory glass of wine. Travis (skilled labor) remained unscathed by poo, and in fact wasn’t even in the house when the cascade hit, because he wanted to redo part of that caulk line at Ma P’s, so he was over there. Oh, the screams he missed. 

So, Laura and I are mouse poo friends forever. It turns out, there are few things more bonding than a mouse poo cascade. Have a great week everyone! Sorry for the late post, but I had to deal with the driveway this morning so that Tayden didn’t die going down it. My driveway needs a name. I am accepting suggestions.