I’m continually amazed by my ability to rationalize away facts that don’t conform to my world view.  Years ago, my apartment was burglarized while I was asleep, and the thieves emptied much of my living room, but I walked through the room 3 or 4 times without noticing anything missing.  Finally, I sat down to eat breakfast and noticed some papers on the table that I had left on a stereo speaker the night before.  I thought this odd, but decided I must have been mistaken about where I left them.  I tried to put them back on the speaker and then noticed that the speaker wasn’t there.  Again, I found it strange that I had moved the speaker without remembering having done it.  Finally, when I noticed the speaker wire sitting on the floor, unattached to speaker or stereo system, that reality began to assert itself.

More recently, I’d convinced myself that there are no mice at Hollow Oak Farm.  I store corn in the barn for the sheep and try to be careful to always keep it in a metal can with a lid, but I’ve been occasionally sloppy with no consequences; ergo:  no mice.  Today as I was finishing up the preparations for lambing in the barn, I saw kernels of corn in a pocket of my tool belt.

I didn’t remember being sloppy with corn near my tools, but I must have been, right?  I continued to see kernels in odd places and finally went to look at a cup of corn I had left out on a table.

Hmm.  Not only hungry mice (or voles or something small; the droppings I eventually saw were too small for squirrels), but industrious and far-sighted mice caching their riches in case I wised up.

Later in the day, after I filled the wood boiler, I smelled a funny burning odor, not quite wood, but kind of pleasant.  I convinced myself that it was some paper that I had put in earlier — it must not have burned completely before, and when I shifted around the logs, it must have caught again.  I went back to work in the barn, and I was puzzled that that the burning paper still smelled so strongly.  I eventually noticed the smoke and burning embers on my shirt sleeve…