To the mattresses

Wednesday, you feel like Tuesday. And Google Docs: That little hide yesterday’s six pages of meeting notes as a two-days-late April Fool’s joke? Totally not funny. Just one more indicator of the pressing need to figure out G-Suite and Chrome OS, and PDQ. I’ll get to it.

The mouse has returned (a new mouse, of course); and the efforts to catch and kill it are ascending to new heights, or descending to new lows, depending on your perspective. Although the low-tech, non-violent approach was successful last time, the new mouse visitor appears to be notably brighter than his deceased predecessor and he (or likely she) has thus far thwarted every mouse-catching effort. My husband started with a combination of sticky traps, traditional spring-release traps, and a variety of bait. And although the space underneath the kitchen sink is now nearly spotless, having been thoroughly cleaned; and is also a virtual killing field for mice, we continue to see evidence that the mouse has been able to gnaw its way through the door-mounted garbage bag that hangs on the inside of the cabinet door and to then enjoy a late-night buffet.

So he bought an electronic mouse trap, which I promise is a real, manufactured item, available for sale at Home Depot and other retailers, for an obscene and ridiculous price. Well, it’s $40, but $40 for a mousetrap is absurdly expensive. Even as he purchased the silly thing, he was almost sure that it wouldn’t work, but he felt driven to at least try it. Meanwhile, he rigged the traps and the garbage bag in a way that appeared virtually mouse-proof, except to the mouse, who easily picked her way around the landmines.

And then he bought a night-vision deer camera. Do you think I’m kidding? I’m not. Here it is.

It's the fatigue-green plastic thing on the left. Note that there are
no fewer than four mousetraps here, and those are only the ones visible. 

I didn’t even ask how much this cost, because I would rather not know. With a combination of outrage over having been outsmarted by a mouse and curiosity tinged with grudging respect, my husband became obsessed with actually seeing what the mouse was doing, and how it was managing to evade the obstacle course of death; and the next thing I knew, we owned a deer camera. I don’t know if he even knew that such a thing as a deer camera even existed (I certainly didn’t) but last week while shopping for my son’s baseball pants, he wandered over to the hunting section at Dick’s and there it was: Infrared light deer camera, or whatever the hell technology allows you to take video of wildlife under cover of near total darkness. He was sold.

He caught some footage of the thing last night, but we could only see part of its body (not sure which is worse--the head or the tail--we could see its icky little beady-eyed face but not its revolting tail) so we know that the mouse was at large last night, but we’re still not sure how it got through the cabinet and avoided the traps. The camera has been repositioned in the hopes that we’ll get footage that shows the whole sequence: Entry into the cabinet from whatever tiny hole or crevice remains following extensive hole-plugging efforts, dodge and weave through the minefield, mouse middle finger at the camera, trash feast, exit stage left.

Or maybe we’ll just housetrain the vile creature and learn to live with it. Not that I’d want it as a pet, but if it didn’t leave droppings behind, then I could probably learn to coexist with it. As long as I didn’t have to see it. Or hear it. Or maintain any conscious awareness of its existence under my roof.

Never mind: It has to get out of my house, or die. We’re going to the mattresses.