The Insane Space Hunter (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} inanespacehuntr) wrote,@ 2007-04-03 14:55:00 |
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| Current location: | Golden City Brewery, Golden, CO |
| Current mood: | HAIKU-ED!! |
| Current music: | Sure Would, Sherwood-Puke & Snot-Puke & Snot Vs The Bard In |
Notches on my BB pistol
Crazy computer game driving antics and mouse-related mayhem abound. Don't read the first part if you're one of those people that believes in humane treatment of invasive vermin within the premises of one's sleeping quarters. Just skip to the section with the SkullDaisy graphic.
Anyway, we've had problems with mice at the house for a while now--we keep trapping, killing, or frightening them easily, but they soon return in greater numbers. Now, small things like mice, to me, are little more than an annoyance, nibbling inexplicably at books left on the floor or perhaps chewing on food left out on the counter, but they frighten my mother to death. Which changes their status from "little more than an annoyance" to "sworn lifelong enemies that shall be ethnically cleansed from our abode like one scrapes pond scum from one's waders whilst one is flyfishing." Meaning that I armed myself with my Walther PPK CO2 pistol and enough BBs to kill Mothra (whom I only used because I couldn't remember any huge mouse monsters and thus went to "moth" which is at least near to "mouse" if you sort vermin alphabetically) and took to playing my PSP in the basement with the lights off, waiting for the blighters to appear.
Now, I *did* remove some of them humanely; one inexplicably fell into the trash can in the middle of the room, so we took it outside, and we caught one in a pizza box and let it go. But still there were mice. And so I decided to employ a more decisive action--the glue traps, while effective, simply weren't eliminating them fast enough. Especially since my mom was getting more up-in-arms about the whole thing every day. I still think it's kinda silly to have such an inane fear of something so, well, tiny, but that's beside the point.
Last night, just as I was going to bed, I heard a mouse clambering around next to the trash can where we caught one of his brethren. I'd figured out on previous occassions that they would often see me moving to kill them when the lights were on, so I left them off and primed my pistol. Plus, my eyes were already adjusted to the dim light cast by the TV set. Within about thirty seconds, I'd picked out my target. I'm actually kind of proud of the shot I made, since it was a small mouse about an inch long about ten feet away in the dark and I hit it on the first shot. I only wounded it, though, and it started trying to crawl away, so I shot it twice more to make sure. The second time I hit it, it moved again, but whether that was from the force of the BB impact or because it was miraculously still alive I have no idea. The third shot pinned it up against an ottoman in the middle of the room and it moved no more.
Fortunately for me and the cleanup of my kill, all three shots had taken place while the mouse was atop an open wide-ruled notebook, which effectively caught both the blood and two of the BBs. Plus, it was undoubtedly easier to see the brown mouse on the white notebook in the dark than it would've been to pick it out on the reddish carpet. I picked up the notebook and took it to the trash cans outside the house (checking to make sure I hadn't just shot holes and spilled the blood of my vanquished foe upon someone's homework--I can just imagine the conversation the next day: "Timothy, where's your homework?" "Oh, well, it's now a bloodstained and pockmarked battleground in my brother's holy war against the infidel mice that frighten my mother."), thus ending another invader's reign of terror.
This is actually the third mouse I've killed with the BB gun--the first one was on the stairs and the second was actually a mercy killing after the bugger got caught by a glue trap. This is also the third one eliminated within a week--there's no telling how many are actually around (there's at least two more, I think), but at least we're making progress.
On an unrelated note, mice are cannibalistic. We caught two with the same glue trap (the first one with the mice-attractant bait and the second one, apparently, with the dead body of the first mouse)--we found the trap with the mice on top of one another, and the one on bottom had been chewed on something fierce. I don't think it was just rough sex, either. Though that would make it necrophilia. :P
On to more pleasant matters.
(SkullDaisy Sigil used to identify a video-game related section, apparently)
Sunday (and for a bit on Saturday), Lurch and I played Battlefield 2: Modern Combat. Brilliant game, lots of fun. For the better part of seven hours(ish), we tooled around in jeeps, tanks, and parachutes, guns blazing and rockets roaring. My brothers came along for the fun on Sunday, giving us five out of six members of Team SkullDaisy--me (El Gimp), Mike (Lurch), Sean (SpamOMan), Timothy (Babbitt), and Daniel (Vagabond). The only one missing was Chris (Quark), but that's because he's in the navy for several more months or so.
I, being the de facto leader of the team (generally, we've just worked together enough to end up in the right places at the right times to support each other and thusly plan little, if at all), took on the role of medic and squad leader--allowing me to set targets for our AI commander's artillery strikes, act as a spawn point for everybody in my squad, and direct my intrepid comrades into the thick of the battle (or at least to where the enemy artillery is so that we can blow it up). Also, I have the ability to heal people (mostly Lurch and SpamOMan, both notorious for charging tanks on foot; though Lurch at least has C4 to blow it up with, unlike SpamOMan's shotgun) and revive them with shock paddles. The shock paddles also double as my close-quarters weapon; sure, I have a knife, too, but my brain is mapped to pull them out on a moment's notice when Lurch suddenly explodes and thus, when I empty my rifle and my pistol, I think of them, use them (or die trying), and then say "Oh, yeah, the combat knife. RIIIGHT."
Lurch, my second-in-command and mounted machine gunner, took on the role of special forces operative and demolitions. He gets a fully automatic M4 instead of my burst-fire M16A2, sure, but no shock paddles. He also has a silenced pistol, which I'm sure makes a difference somehow, in theory. We employed his C4 quite a bit, between destroying tanks and artillery emplacements. Of course, half the time, he'd blow himself up along with the tank, at which point I'd revive him (God bless video game mechanics), but we got the tank in the end.
SpamOMan was our engineer and close-range shotgun-wielding maniac (he only killed me once), who repaired our hummers when I'd roll them most of the way over or just run into things/people/tanks/other cars. Incidentally, vehicular homicide is now my favorite method of killing people in that game. He also set mines that sometimes worked, or at least, that worked sometimes when I was watching so as to notice that they worked. They may have worked other times, too, but I didn't notice (probably because I was upside down in a creek with a combat jeep and fifty-caliber machine gun on top of me).
Vagabond (otherwise known as Oh Heck) messed around with a few different kits before settling down as a support specialist, resupplying our ammunition and generally laying down a whole lot of covering fire with his M-249 Squad Assault Weapon. He was handy whenever we'd need to take over a base crawling with soldiers, seeing as Lurch had an automatic weapon but only thirty bullets in a clip and I had a burst-fire assault rifle and shock paddles.
Babbitt worked as an anti-armor "rocket man" and also as a special ops guy when Lurch would get a bee in his britches and run off with a support specialist to "stick it to the man." Since Lurch had made a habit of blowing up tanks and himself with C4, the anti-armor was probably the one kit we could do without. Well, we didn't have a sniper, either (that's where Quark would otherwise come in, had he been here and not on a naval base in Washington or something), but my M16A2 is pretty good a long range and men way far away from us are generally unimportant as they'll either be chased down by Vagabond in a tank or Lurch and I in a jeep anyway.
We actually successfully defended one of our outposts with a jeep once; our commander ordered us to defend a point that the enemy forces were taking over, and it so happened that we were in a jeep at the time. Thus, we high-tailed it over there, guns blazing, and found that our intrepid AI commander had sounded an all-points alert because two men--a sniper and an engineer--were hunkered down next to our flag. Now, it's possible for two men to take a flag, especially if it's Lurch and I, but we make sure to hunker down behind something so that some yahoo can't just run over us in a jeep.
These men, however, didn't think of that. They bravely stood next to our flag, attempting to take it and firing their guns as fast as they could work their respective actions, but to no avail--I smashed the jeep into the wall behind them, with them sandwiched in between. I then looked at Lurch and said "Defended!" to let him know that we had successfully done just that, and we drove off into the sunset (or another wall).
You'd think that with heroics like these, our AI commander would like our slapdash, misfit "SkullDaisy" unit, but I don't think that's the case. It might just be bad planning on the part of the AI, but he seems to order us into an area, wait thirty seconds while we secure it, and then proceed to blow it to kingdom come with a precision artillery strike (taking us along with whatever we haven't blown up or killed yet). One can almost envision a by-the-book commander leading a platoon of troops into battle, mobilizing armor and infantry with military precision, and then getting to the base and finding that "that damn medic lieutenant and his ragtag band of bumbling misfits got here before us, crashed a jeep into their guard patrol, blew up their defensive tank and their artillery, hijacked a troop transport (Grand Theft Auto, eat your heart out) and took the base in a raging firestorm of metallic shrapnel and flying body parts." So naturally, he then orders us to the front line, then calls in artillery strikes in hopes we'll accidentally be killed by "friendly" fire. It's probably because after the battles, we're hailed as heroes and he has to preside over a ticker tape parade in our honor or something.
THAT would be a sight to behold--Lurch, in a body cast covered in Purple Hearts, SpamOMan stroking his shotgun lovingly... anyway, it would be an interesting parade.
In closing, gaze upon this haiku a generator thing spat out at me. And have a nice day.
The Insane Space Hunter
