Last night! Oh, it's the last night.

Leaving Hutchinson is very easy. Leaving anywhere is very easy when you spend so much time packing. You're just like: I want to get the fuck out of here. Get me out, now.

I'm taking a break from packing at the time--my landlord is showing the apartment. The more I clean it, the more I realize that my dad was sort of right when he called it a dump. It's just old, and old houses never feel like they're clean. I can scrub, scrub, scrub, and it still looks dirty.

But what really makes it easy to leave is the basement. Since I've started pulling boxes from the downstairs, I've realized a couple of things:

1) something is leaking, water, and it caused shit to fall from the ceiling, over a bunch of my shit--ruined my boots, destroyed the ottoman, made me glad I didn't have anything down there I'd be upset about losing;

2) mice, mice, mice, fucking fucking mice.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a little poo on the dryer, I swiped it away, convinced myself it was just a dark piece of lint. Then, with a box I'd brought upstairs, I noticed a little piece of poo; convinced myself it was leftover poo from when all of the things were in James' shed.

But when I started moving the boxes around, really, I found a whole lot of poo. There was a corner near the staircase where this mouse had just shit his brains out, and another corner that he'd turned into his personal toilet--or like a small grass field, if he were an entire herd of cattle. There was so much shit, it looked like someone had spilled a box of shit on the floor.

So, I convinced myself that the mouse had just been there in the winter, he and a couple of his friends had just decided to hang out because it was cold outside. I mean, there is nothing in the basement for him to eat, and there is absolutely no evidence of a mouse upstairs (not a poo to be found, praise the Lord) so it only makes sense that a mouse use the basement to stop from freezing to death. There's no mouse down here right now! I said stupidly to myself. It was months ago, and the poo is just still here! I mean, the basement must be an awesome place to shit for him. He just comes in to take a dump. Just like the special bathrooms Christina found at MSU so she could poo and nobody would bother her.

Lots of spiders, though. Loooots of spiders.

Nonetheless, whenever I went to grab a box for more packing, I still shoved the broom at it first. Like poking a sleeping dragon just to see what it does. Nothing ever ran out. Very little evidence of poo in the boxes, just mostly on the floor.

So the just-in-the-winter theory definitely worked.

But then, this morning, after I'd spent yesterday stabbing boxes and sweeping up shit, I went downstairs to put in a load of laundry. And there were three poops right there, on top of the washing machine. Poops that were definitely not there a couple days ago.

Who the fuck shits on a washing machine. There's plenty of floor to be had, but the little bastard has to shit on the washing machine. Just to be a fucker. Just to say hey, Jean, have fun being in the basement, because I'm not a winter mouse. I'm an all-year mouse. And I might be down here somewhere.

Little fucker.

So. Starting with Winona, I had: centipedes (at King Street), then in Mankato: centipedes at SW and centipedes/moths at Highland, then in Minneapolis: centipedes, then in Elgin: mice, and now in Hutchinson: mice.

I have to be honest, I'm pretty excited not to have a basement next year. Second floor, here I come. Please, vermin, leave me alone. You've made a stronger woman, but I just want to go back to being a girl.