House Mouse Adventures

A brief message tonight: there are mice in my house.  There is also a hamster in my house, but we want the hamster here.  The mice arrived uninvited.

On the second floor, a baby mouse (about the size of my hamster's head) was inadvertently captured when it smelled peanut butter and fell into the sink.  My housemate, Yuki, arrived at home and found a small mouse bouncing around.  It was too small to gain the elevation required to escape the sink, though.  Yuki poured the water out of the empty peanut butter jar and captured the mouse.

That night, I walked up to the second floor to see the little critter.  Yuki carefully opened the peanut butter jar, and a very, very small rodent looked up at me pathetically.  Its fur was spiky and drenched in a mixture of peanut butter and water.  Tiny black eyes stared at me, and then House Mouse gave a mighty leap in an attempt to free itself.  Yuki slammed the lid back on.

Known Fact: I like rodents.  I decided to rescue the House Mouse from its peanutty conundrum.  I carefully transfered it to an old hamster ball.

I placed a breadstick in the hamster ball as a snack.  The breadstick probably equalled the mouse in volume.

The House Mouse was very cute.  I aaalmost considered keeping it, except it was so small that it would have escaped any cage I put it in.

At length, it came time to transfer House Mouse into a carrying container.  The next morning, Yuki was going to release House Mouse into some bushes.  I prepared a cozy little home as best I could.

The small home included some oats and a water-soaked paper towel to lick.  Ken helped me transfer House Mouse into the new container.  House Mouse almost escaped.  Finally, before I took the package upstairs, I wrote a letter so that the people living on the 2nd floor would know that something other than oats was in this oats container:

The note read:

Safe travels, small rodent!

(Note: the 3rd floor has caught and released 3 mice now... two larger mice and one tiny one.)

Mount Kilimanjaro

First, a couple more announcements:

1. I once again blog for beer!  This time I am joined in my Iron Blogging by Kevin R. of the Free Dissociation blog.  Please check it out and let me know if he starts owing me beer!

2. A couple of people have pointed out that, while the "TAIL-us" pronunciation is more common, the other pronunciation of "TAL-us" is certainly also used.  Hurrah!  Here is some celebratory talus:

From K-FREE's flickr photostream

Now, onto the topic of the day: Mount Kilimanjaro.

Mount Kilimanjaro is one of the Seven Summits (the set containing the tallest peak on each continent), but it is one of the easier of the Seven Summits to climb.  Notably, in a sense you can "just walk up the mountain" without a bunch of technical gear and ice-climbing expertise.  Because of this, I had sort of been thinking about Kilimanjaro as just a long hike.  Turns out, I was underestimating it.

This and future Kilimanjaro images are from Fabio Bretto's flickr photostream

The first clue that I'd underestimated the mountain came when I looked up just how tall Kilimanjaro actually is: 19,341 feet.  That's pretty serious.  So, sure, you can "just hike up the mountain" but you'll get HAPE or HACE (high altitude pulmonary edema or cerebral edema) and possibly die.

Wikipedia actually says "All trekkers will suffer considerable discomfort, typically shortness of breath, hypothermia, and headaches."  Citation needed, but... that's a pretty strong statement.  Lesson 1: Kilimanjaro is tall.  Photos taken on summit expeditions remind me of photos taken out of airplane windows:

The way to climb Kilimanjaro is to take a week, possibly more, to acclimatize yourself.  In fact, Tanzania's regulations require that ascents take at least 5 days.  You spend many nights on the mountainside in little camps.

Apparently this mountain kills a lot of people -- not because of falling ice or white-out blizzards, but because people don't take the time to acclimatize themselves.  Again, the take-home message is that the mountain is very very tall!

One phrase you can apparently use to describe Mount Kilimanjaro, which I think is awesome, is "Afromontane sky island."  Afromontane means it's a mountain in Africa, and "sky island" refers to the fact that Mount Kilimanjaro rises up from largely-flat surroundings.  It has a prominence of 19,308 feet with respect to its surroundings, making it ranked 4th in the world for prominence.

I highly recommend you check out this panoramic image showing Kilimanjaro from a nearby African town called Moshi.  Zoom in, and consider how big Kilimanjaro looks compared to its surroundings.  Maybe you can start to get an idea for why this is one of the Seven Summits.

This is probably a bad time to say this, now that I've spent my blog post discussing the dangers of Mount Kilimanjaro, but there is some non-zero probability I'll attempt to climb this eventually.  My friend Yuki and her brother and father are planning to climb this mountain at some point, and I've asked that they keep me in the loop.  I'll make sure they (we?) take at least a week to climb.  And that no one dies.

I might do a series of blog posts on some of the Seven Summits.  I'm particularly interested in the Antarctic summit (Vinson Massif), the European summit (Mount Elbrus), and the North American summit (Denali, or Mt. McKinley).  Feel free to request that I focus on certain aspects of the mountains/the climbing experience.

Until next time!