Gross.
We last had a mouse during a cold snap in 2011 or 2012, and we hadn't seen or heard one since. Then one day, I heard a sound that could only be described as "scurrying," but whatever was scurrying stayed out of sight. The next day, my husband said that he saw a gray streak flash by; and then the day after that, I saw the actual live-in-the-flesh mouse.
So gross.
My husband called the exterminator, and they came out and set traps. Something, as I pointed out, that we could easily have done ourselves, saving the almost $500 per year that we pay the exterminator (but that's a story for another day). After a few days, to no one's surprise, the mouse remained at large. So my husband took matters into his own hands, and built a better mousetrap.
*****
A long time ago, when the boys were little, the three of them were obsessed with keeping the rabbits out of our tomatoes. They'd set Havahart traps in the backyard, and in the mornings, they would drive to a park and let the rabbits go. This went on all summer, until one night, we left the gate open by accident, and some deer came in and ate all of the tomatoes. With the tomato crop ravaged, there was no longer any reason to force the rabbits into exile. We packed away the traps, and the rabbits roamed freely once again.
Another battle in the long war between my husband and the rodents involved unauthorized squirrel access to his beloved birdfeeder. After a few days of studying the squirrels and their habits, he fashioned a squirrel-proof birdfeeder out of an actual birdfeeder, several frisbees, and part of an umbrella. I can't describe it any better than that. Use your imagination. The thing actually worked, though it looked ridiculous hanging from the tree in our front yard.
*****
So the mouse is round three. There are mouse traps everywhere, and my husband has constructed barriers for the doorways, using cardboard boxes. The barriers have small holes, baited and booby-trapped. Wile E. Korean is quite sure that the mouse will be irresistibly drawn to the hole, and will run through it, only to be inextricably trapped on the other side.
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| Did you think I was kidding? |
It's now the third morning since these makeshift walls were erected (I have to step over them to get through the doorway) and we haven't trapped a mouse yet. I make my husband get up to check, because I don't want to be the first person to see a trapped mouse at 6 in the morning.
*****
We finally caught the mouse the day after I wrote this. Not a moment too soon, as I'd begun to worry about new and extreme measures threatened by the male members of the household. I had already caught my 16-year-old son patrolling the kitchen, armed with a loaded BB gun. ("Mom. Trust me. It ran under the stove, and it has to come out eventually. When it does, I'll pop a cap in its ass.") Again, teenage boys are idiots, in case you missed my last post. Meanwhile, I'd begun to be afraid to walk through my own house in the dark, for fear that I'd end up in a bear trap, or hanging upside down by my ankle from a zip line.
So the stockings are hung by the chimney with care, and humans are the only creatures stirring, and that's the way we like it. Merry Christmas.
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