You are here

Mice, Hugo, Galland

There was a rustling in the kitchen garbage last night. I nudged the under-sink kitchen door open just enough to see the side of something large and furry. Eek!

When Sara finds spiders in the bathtub, I get to rescue them. For mammals it turns out our roles are reversed. Sara's closer look found that

  1. It was a small (beady-eyed, cute!) mouse.
  2. It was at the bottom of the (mostly empty) trash, and couldn't get back out. Spiders fall for this all the time, but I'd expected more of our mammalian cousins.

So, she gingerly carried the trash bin out back, and we tipped it over until the mouse could scramble out and hop into the grass.

Then we spent a few minutes looking for a set of mouse traps we'd bought after a previous false alarm. No luck, they'd disappeared.

This morning, some twenty years after my first, I finished my second pass through "Les Misérables", this time in the original. I enjoyed it, but honestly it would probably be saner to read an abridged version: it's a big romantic story that could be told in a few pages, expanded to some 1500, in part with the help of numerous digressions, most of which I can't really swear to have read with much care. One digression, on convents, is particularly dull. Though some others (the Paris sewers!) make up for it.

I *thought* I would also finish something else today: a librivox.org reading of Antoine Galland's original translation of the 1001 nights--more fun French practice. But when I got to the end I found out that volume 2 (the site only has 2 volumes) isn't actually the last. And now I'm confused. Which edition exactly is the source of their volume divisions? It was originally in 12 volumes. The place they ended volume 2 was page 74 of this google book, volume 4 in some edition. There's a 3-volume edition on amazon. Another scan. I'm confused.