Too much Christmas cheer...

My husband and I drove along the road winding around the properties here, going up towards the main highway.  I brought along a plastic bag and a clippy-thing to pick up trash along that road, being that some people think the side-roads are their own private garbage cans.  I cannot stand the sight of soda and beer cans and chip bags blowing around in the grass along the side of that road, so I make it a point to keep it clean, as do some of the other neighbors.  Besides that, tomorrow night is Christmas Eve.  Santa would not be pleased if one of his reindeer happened to step on a can of Bud Light.

So back and forth we went along that road.... my husband driving, both of us looking for trash, and stopping when we saw something that needed to be picked up.  Had it been warmer out there, we would have been walking, but once again, the temperatures have dropped into northern numbers on the thermometer.

On the road near the main highway, we saw the sun reflecting on a large glass bottle... I got out of the car with the plastic bag and the clippy-thing, and saw that it was a liquor bottle that someone had tossed into the grass before making the turn onto the main highway. (Are they stupid enough to think that the effects of what was in that bottle wouldn't hamper their driving?)

I picked up the bottle with the clippy-thing and saw two inches of liquid still at the bottom of the bottle.... I turned it upside-down with the clipper and then realized that there was a tiny field mouse floating in the liquor.  Yuck, yuck, yuck....... poor thing was dead of course, but I'm used to seeing field mice so other than those few "yucks," I didn't scream or toss the clipper into the woods. (That would not have been the case had there been a snake in the bottom of that bottle.)

The mouse was tiny enough to have crawled into the neck of the bottle after someone had tossed it in the grass. Apparently, the mouse was also thirsty enough to have begun drinking the liquor.  Either he drank enough of the liquor to kill him, or he drank enough to make him tipsy and then he couldn't find his way back out of the bottle. Either way, he was dead.  My husband said "He died happy."

I continued with my "yucks" all the way back home, knowing that there was a dead mouse inside the bottle that was now tucked into the plastic trash bag.  Not exactly a Disney Christmas story, but that's all I've got for today.