Worm Tale

[ExArkie]

My husband was a fisherman and a boat nut! When we were very young and could not afford to go far for his fishing, he used to use earthworms as bait and fish in the creek which was just down the road from our house.

Fishing worms were expensive - so, when he bought a "box" he kept them in the back of my refrigerator - I HATED that!!!:104511: I was always after him to use the worms or throw them out.

One day, I was cleaning the fridge and I saw a worm container which had been there forever. The worms HAD to be dead - so, I took them out and emptied the container off the porch.

Of course, that very day, my husband came home and went looking for his worms. I told him the worms were dead and I had thrown them out. I went to show him where I had thrown them - AND, of course, the dead worms had revived themselves after the cold fridge and crawled away to safety.:0012:

My husband told every friend and acquaintance we had about the escaping worms. But, after that, he got an old fridge for the back room and my fridge was off limits for his little playthings!!:thud2:

[Smokey Stover]

I can just imagine how you enjoyed finding worms carefully stored in your regrigerator. Since I'm not a fisherman the subject never came up. When we clean the parking area behind the house, we always find that earthworms have made their home in the accumulated dust that lines the curb that surrounds the parking area. When we clean out the dirt from next to the curb, we carefully retrieve the worms and find them good homes in the garden. Like your husband, we hate to waste worms, aside from the fact that we like the little critters.

But that's not my story. I used to raise rats and mice, although no longer. In fhe first place, mice have too short a life-span to make good pets. For another, we started hosting cats in our house, and there's a lot of incompatibility there.

Two of our mice were grasshopper mice. Lacking grasshoppers, especially in the winter, we fed them mealworms. They don't require--or enjoy--refrigeration. They are also very easy to feed and handle, are dry and not at all slimy, and, in short, the best worms you can have if you have to have worms. As for how the mice ate them, I preferred not to look. So don't ask.