# Mousing by moonlight



## moustress (Sep 25, 2009)

Way-ell...there are serious priorities to what happens when the power goes down in half the house. Friday we lost electrical service to the entire upstairs and part of the kitchen. It has been unseasonably warm, with temps above 80F. The mousery area is upstairs and there's no shade, so we usually set up the window AC in that area long before we need it downstairs.

Naturally, the meeces get preference in this situation as well. We have run a heavy duty extension cord from the downstairs to power the AC in the mousery area. and are doing the evenings work in the mousery itself by the light of a battery powered spotlight and a ferociously bright LED flashlight. I have forsaken sweeping in there until the power is restored.

We have a lovely young electrician working now to determine the problem and give us some ideas on how to improve our system. It's long overdue; we have only 20 and 30 amp service currently, with the exception of one 60amp circuit that powers the portable AC/heating unit in the garret where Nate works at his day job.

We know it's risky to run AC on normal circuits, so I asked for an estimate for repairts, and an estimate for laying in of one or more new lines for the AC units.


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## Wight Isle Stud (May 19, 2010)

Good luck moustress, I am a British Electrician and the mousery would of got my attention first


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## moustress (Sep 25, 2009)

No question. It's a lot easier than hauling all 60* tanks down to basement. We did that once about four years ago on a night when the humidity was way past tropical, and the temps near 100F...and wouldn't Murphy just know it-the power came back about a minute after we had finished the move.

We left them in the basement for the night, as it was 3 am, and Nate was expecially tired after playing bass with his rock band in a lovely new club a few miles from home. And I made the best of a bad situation, and used the opportunity to do a thorough cleaning in the mousery, from the cobwebs though all the shelving, down to the floorboards etc.


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## jadeguppy (Jun 4, 2011)

60 cages? :shock: How many mice do you have and how in the world do you keep track of the lineages?


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## Rhasputin (Feb 21, 2010)

I'm about to go to a 60 cage set up. :lol: 
I have about 30 cages right now, and I'm switching to lab cages, which means I can have double the cages in the same amount of space. Don't know if I'll fill them all up. . . But consider the fact that I may have to use up to 20 of the cages just for lone bucks, some that are reserved for the next show, and some that I use for breeding. . .

Then I also have a large ASF breeding set-up, so that contributes to my cage numbers, it's about half ASFs and half mice!

I've heard of someone who had 200 cages, all in their home before. . . scary.
This person apparently had some mental issue though. :|


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## moustress (Sep 25, 2009)

I haven't done a census in about six weeks....I'd guess I have about 200 right now, counting the babies. That's down from an all time high of 375, 150 of which were rescues from a pet store that was closing down. Many of those meeces were pts in the first two or three weeks after I took them, along with all the equipment, about 12 years ago. Many of them were in bad shape from being in tanks that had very little ventilation and had cedar bedding. I only agreed to take them because he had one tank of meeces that he liked better, fawn satins and I made him give me a couple of those. It was good to get all that equipment too. The satin fawn meeces were not what I was hoping for, namely a healthy genome for a healthy satin line, but I still feel good about rescuing those meeces and giving them a chance.

I had about 285 at the time of the accident last December; I don't plan on having 200 for long. I bred about 18 litters since the accident so I could restore my fawn and tricolor lines, though most of it was for the fawn line. I have pts'd some of them, and will probably do more in that regard in the next month or so. I could have gotten the fawns in two generations instead of three, but I didn't want to inbreed as heavily as that would require.

I do keep records that I don't really need....I seem to be able to remember just fine, and the only other aid I have is the naming system for the ones I breed. I have an excellent memory for little things like meeces. It's a lot of work, but love animal husbandry. All my spare cash goes for mousery maintainence and supplies. I buy about 500 lbs. of grain two or three times a year, which helps keep the cost of food down, and I order equipment online in bulk once or twice a year for the same savings in that area.

This forum is another way I keep the record of the lines; this forum is a godsend!!


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## moustress (Sep 25, 2009)

Yeah, Rhasputin, you are an 'all the way' personality, just like moi. Roland, bless his pointed li'l head, claims to have around 550 to 600 mousies as well as a couple of hundred of other small furries. I never had critters in such quantity other than chickens, not at all fancy, just tasty. I don't think we ever had more than about 50 or 60 at one time, though. (My brother had more pigeons for awhile, I think. He let his fly free and they kept bringing their chums back to the roost and breeding and so forth.)

The electricians gave up trying to find the splice for the upstairs power. We had one guy working on it for a couple of hours, then two, then three. Amateur electrical work, when it goes bad, requires professional intercession. We are getting two new circuits, one for the mus/music room, and other for the garret office. We will do without normal power for two weeks, running a 9 gauge extension cords to each room. I will set up some lamps for the mousery. It's romantic verging on stupid to continue using the torches if we can arrange to have electric lamps. I'm very glad that the rest of the house was found to be in adequate shape as far as the wiring goes. It'll squeeze the budget but not break it to do what needs to be done.

One benefit of this ruckus is that Nate now knows that he can easily move his work computer anywhere in the house and still do his job. He has a little computer that is essentially a netbook in a small box. His flat screen monitor weighs more than the computer. The only thing he isn't confident about moving is recabling everything after. We're coaxing him along bit by bit hoping he'll learn to look at stuff and see what goes where.


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## moustress (Sep 25, 2009)

Rain, rain, rain. There goes Indian summer, there go the leaves...it was nice while it lasted.

We needed the rain as there have been way too many fires in the grasslands and what should be wetlands are just standing tinder waiting for any spark to flare up. I hope the farmers were able to harvest in the two good weeks we have had. It was incredibly nice, albeit overly dry. I water the lawn for the first time since sometimes last summer after deciding that i still like having grass to wiggle my toes and roll around in as I watch clouds pass overhead and change color as the sun sets.

My mums are all cracking their buds. I may be making big bouquets by next week, as temps are supposed to plunge severely. It would be nice to have a month or so where we need nieither AC nor heat. *sigh* My cats can the sense the change coming and have been bouncing off the wall, literally. Polished hardwood floors, you know? Hit the carpet runner for traction, head off to the other end of the house like a furry rocket, fail at braking before the bedroom oak door...heehee...*scrabblescrabblethump* It's a good thing they have very thick coats to cushion them somewhat.


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## moustress (Sep 25, 2009)

That last post really should have gone in BMFP. Oops.

the electricians should be finishing up today; it was a pleasure to have normal lighting for last night's work in the mousery. We have a new lighting fixture in there (yay!) and a new outlet in that room as well.

I'm at the stage where I need to put the little boys and little girls in separate tanks, which means shifting the populations of adult females around, consolidating some tanks, etc.

The blue tris have starting opening their eyes. Most of them are blue agouti, but I actually like these, as they have excellent contrast between the silver/lilac patches and the agouti/sand patches. There's a satin curly blue tri doe in that batch. That whole litter consists of really quite large individuals with fat tails, and, I'm relieved to say after their ears starting out looking triangular and folded, nice little round ears.


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## jadeguppy (Jun 4, 2011)

Glad to hear it is progressing well.


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