A Warm Welcome Home or Whose Been Shitting In My Bed?

I've spent the last 26 days trekking the urban jungle of Sydney, the extreme sport jungle of New Zealand, and the actual jungle of the Blue Mountains, and I'm sure, dear reader, that my future blogs will cover my adventures down under, but for now it's all about my homecoming.

I personally believe that trips are not about the destination but the journey, except when flying to opposite corners of this round planet. Then it is all about the destination. New Zealand is so far away from England that the plane could not hold enough fuel to make it in one jump. We stopped to refill in Hong Kong. This provided a good opportunity for me to not only reset the time on my watch, but the date as well. On my way home there were 53 films available on the flight, and I think I watched them all. That's how far away New Zealand is. So when I finally arrived home last night I was excited for many things, but none more than a night in my own bed.

I had a warm welcome home with a few surprise gifts from friends at work, but nothing was more surprising than finding out that I have a new roommate. Apparently, since I've been gone mice have infested my room.

I wandered into my room after two days of traveling to see my bathroom was not quite as I left it. On the floor are what look like two fist sized, perfectly square lumps of poo. "That fake poo doesn't look real," I think to myself. "It's too square. But not a bad prank." However upon closer inspection I see that the "poo" is actually the remains of a large chocolate bar that was once on my living room table. The chocolate had been dragged into the bathroom, divided into two equal shares, and gently gnawed on all edges making the square bar somewhat trapezoidal in shape. I find the outer wrapper of the chocolate partially gnawed through, and genitally placed in the shower, but the foil that once encased the chocolate seems to have disappeared completely.

"Swear word," I think, "I have mice. But if this is a mouse then there must be it's leavings somewhere."

And so my scavenger hunt begins. It didn't take me long to remove the duvet from my bed and discover where my new roommate has made himself - or to be more accurate herself (grammatically itself) - at home. My bed is a hole chewed through the sheets, a large collection of ovular pellet poo, and fur.

But how, you may ask, can you tell the sex of the rodent from it's leavings? Simple. If among the poo, fur, and teeth marks your guest leaves a large stain of afterbirth on your bed, then it is a fairly safe assumption that the rodent lacks a y-chromosome. The remains of this miracle of birth has stained through my bed sheet and deep into my mattress. So on my arrival home, nostalgic for my bed, I instead throw away my sheets and call an exterminator to come by on Monday. I guess I won't quite be getting to my own bed just yet. First, I'll have to buy a new one.