Mouse in the House

Well, this was/is just going to be a Monday through Friday blog, but this story is so funny that I had to write it while it was fresh on my mind. A week ago Friday, Wephie (code name for Stephie) told me she saw a mouse in our kitchen. I was hoping she was wrong, but later that night, I spied the little dude making a run for the back door, so KNEW we FOR SURE had a mouse. Had the back door been open, he could have just run outside and that would have been the end of the problem.

Ok, I go to the store. I am perusing the pest aisle at the supermarket.....trying to decide which products to buy to get rid of this mouse. As you know, we have the little 3 pound Chihuahua, so not like I can spread poison of some kind around the kitchen and hope he eats it. My luck, the mouse would eat it all right, do a death dance and die in the middle of the kitchen floor. Then one of the dogs would eat the mouse, get sick, etc. Probably not a good plan to try to poison the mouse. I brought home 4 of the old fashioned wooden traps where you put a little dab of food on the plastic cheese, pull back the leaver and put the thing down.....and hope no one but the mouse gets caught in it. I also bought 4 glue traps. I guess the mouse is supposed to walk on it, and get stuck. I put the traps around my walls in the kitchen and one in my pantry.....waited two days. Nothing.

Dano informed me that her little dog (the one I do not want in the traps or poisoned) is only interested in sniffing around in my computer/sewing room off of the kitchen. She thinks the mouse is in there now. Ok, I was up typing a blog at midnight one night last week, and let me tell you, that dog was right! There, not a foot away from me, little beadie eyes, nose twitching is this gray mouse half way up this AC vent on the wall. He is looking at me......I am looking at him. He is looking at me....I am looking at him. In my mind I inform him that he should leave. I do not speak rodent, but I am pretty sure he was letting me know that he was NOT leaving. I threw a water bottle at him. Of course, I missed. I was hoping to knock him unconscious, so I could scream and have someone else get rid of him. The next day I get up, and one of the glue traps is missing. I find it behind a small box. I think he got one foot stuck in it, took off with the trap and was able to dislodge himself when the trap got stuck on the box.I had tucked a small rug under the door to the room and closed it so Hercules couldn't get out of the room. With no food and water, was hoping he would die.....or eat the food on the traps. He had also turned a very good portion of the rug into little strands that resembled spaghetti noodles. I vacuumed up his mess. I put the glue trap back....I had put a dab of peanut butter on each of the traps. It was untouched. I was beginning to think he had heard about the peanut butter recall and was not taking any chances dying in a trap OR from Salmonella from the peanut butter!

The next day I got up.....He had moved one of the glue traps to the center of the room! I am telling you, I know how that guy felt in Caddie Shack. It is me or the mouse at this point. I took my husband's brand new roll of Gorilla tape and taped all of the traps to the floor. For those of you not familiar with Gorilla tape, it is the stickiest duct tape you have ever seen. For good measure, I even put some of the Gorilla tape sticky side up on my floor in case he decided to run across it....maybe he would get stuck.

Yesterday, there was mouse doo doo on some of the traps.....no mouse. Mr Wonderful went outside, banged dirt off of this metal mouse catching box that I didn't even know we had. He handed it to me and I put it over by the AC register....I sat down at my computer this am, and heard this little scratching.....listened....yep, Silver Bullet aka Hercules was in the cage! He was alive, so didn't want to turn him loose in the yard. (I might as well roll out a red carpet and invite him back inside.) Wephie and I drove a mile down the road and let him loose in a field. He scampered and hopped away. The problem is, the mouse we freed was a brown mouse.....not gray. Just in case there are more mice, I replaced Mr Wonderful's mouse catcher by the register AND in doing so, I managed to step on one of the glue traps not once but twice! The mouse avoided it and I stepped on it....not certain what that says about my brain. We will not explore that today. I need to put my nearly destroyed sewing room back together. "See" you Monday!