Rats!

I’ve had our couch for nine years this month. And in addition to the marginal dinginess you’d expect to build up on a couch after nine years of use, it’s also stained with (what I hope is) chocolate in a few places. So I got up early on Sunday to rent an upholstery cleaner from the faraway grocery store where I rented a rug cleaner three years ago when I sold my condo. But when I got there, I discovered the store doesn’t rent upholstery cleaners anymore. Rats.

So I tried to salvage the trip by picking up a few groceries and stocking up on liquor for a dinner party we’re having on Friday night. The store was inexplicably out of bread (who runs out of bread?) but I filled my cart with bananas and jelly and yogurt and two flavors of vodka and two six-packs of carbonated liquor-based beverages … and a goofy little impulse purchase: a cheese-based toy that looked like it might be fun to keep on my desk at work.

And when I got to the checkout, I discovered that you can’t buy liquor before 11:00 on a Sunday in Chicago. I have no idea if the law is in place to control the behavior of alcoholics or to show some kind of deference to some kind of god, but because of it, I essentially drove across town to buy kitchen staples. And this:

But it's totally adorable! And stretchy! And versatile! You can stick the mice in any hole and tell your mice-in-cheese story any way you want. For instance, you can have them both popping out of the cheese at once as though they live there:

Or you can have their butts hang out one hole and their faces hang out another hole as though they were just passing through:

Or you can add rubber mice left over from Halloween and drag the health department into your story:

Convince Andrew Lloyd Weber to write a score for it, and you might have a hit musical on your hands.

But you'll still have a dingy couch. With (what you hope are) chocolate stains on it. Even with rats and mice in the house.