The Post about my Mouse Feb 5th

For those of you paying attention, yes, the chronology in this post and the one before it seems a little out of whack.

 In truth the previous post was written in November, but not posted becasue I feared it would jinx me. When it didn't matter anymore (see this post) I decided  to give it a whirl.

 

Curse the fates.

A mouse made the migration.

About a week ago I was helping the wife make dinner when I saw what, to my eyes, looked like chocolate sprinkles in the cupboard.

You will note that chocolate sprinkles, while never advertised as such by the manufacturer, bear a striking resemblance to mouse droppings.

My wife put me at ease, pointing out we did have sundae toppings on that very shelf and the kids probably spilled some.

Fine.

Now explain why a few days later a box of crackers was chewed to bits.

Here's where my wife lost me. Normally, to salvage my fragile sanity I can deny reality at will. Not so my wife, who is overly realistic to a fault.

So forgive me for doing a cartoon double-take at her response:

"Maybe the kids did it," she said.

Hey, my kids are beasts when it comes to snack food, and the youngest does have quite a set of choppers, but I doubt they would choose to chew through a box instead of just . . . opening it.

And how did she explain the equally violated box behind it?

"I think I remember yelling at Olivia for doing that," she said.

Yeah, uh-huh. Hey, who knows? If she believed that, maybe she does mean it when she tells me size doesn't matter.

Within a few minutes, the frightening truth came to light: by way of a crack between the cupboard and the wall, a mouse had been feasting on our rations.

[as this isn't Fear Factor I'll leave out what we found in the box of rice; nor will I mention that we'd made chinese food the night before]

I've already explained my fear of mice, so we'll gloss over the aftermath: the panic attack, the persistent and morbid belief that every gust of wind was a mouse crawling on my skin, and the fact that my wife had to all but slap me and tell me to be a man before I'd handle a bag of garbage that included the cracker boxes.

My only hope was that we'd catch the bugger soon. After my wife set the traps (what, you expected me to do it?) I spent an uneasy night tossing and turning.

Overnight the traps had been licked clean without catching a thing.

To say this heightened my anxiety is an understatement. That evening, I came up with a new plan - newly baited traps, each surrounded by a wall of glue traps.

If he figured a way around that, forgetaboutit - no way I was staying in the same house as something that'd escaped from Nimh. .

We got him.

He died heroically, as mice go - he'd gotten tangled in the glue traps, each paw stuck to a different trap, but pushed onward towards his destiny (in this case, the spring trap)

He stayed where he was for a few hours after I found him, until my wife woke up and arranged his funeral.

As for me, I am still recovering.

Despite the fact that I have cleaned the house top to bottom and found no trace of another beast, and that the traps we set out as a precaution remain untouched, I'm leery. Even with fresh groceries I still won't eat anything from the cupboard, and the kitchen gives me the creeps.

The upside to this? Our family has enjoyed more dinners out in the last week than in the whole of 2004.

Of course, by doing this we can no longer afford a mousetrap if we do get another visitor . . .