RETURN TO THE MOUSE HOUSE

You may remember a while back when I told you about our little mouse problem around the house. The short of it is that we had a resident mouse hanging out in our garage. Being the sensitive animal loving guy I am, I used a live trap to catch the offending mouse and let him go outside.

I then proceeded to go through this numerous more times, because it was not a single mouse, but rather the Brady Bunch of mice. I had lots of mice in my garage. And I kindly relocated each one to a more suitable environment (my neighbor’s yard).

Well, I figured that news of my humanity would have spread throughout the mouse world. Or, I guess it would have been my mouseity. Either way, I figured mice throughout the land would have heard how I opted not to eradicate their brethren and would pay me back by staying away from the house.

Mice either need to work on their communication or improve their methods of showing gratitude, because it became evident recently that the mice were back. And they had moved out of the garage.

I was sitting there, minding my own business, when my wife called me over to the pantry. “Look at this,” she said, in a tone that made me think I was going to find my daughter standing knee-deep in flour.

Rather, what I found was two shelves halfway cleaned off, the former items that lived there stacked crudely upon one another. “Uh…” I said, hoping my wife would tell me what I was looking at.

“Can you believe that?” she said.

“Uh…” I said.

“It’s everywhere,” she said.

“Uh…” I said.

“So what are we going to do?” she said.

“We should ground her. Maybe put her in timeout. And no videos for two days.” My wife stared at me with that look of sad resignation, similar to the one she gets when we watch our wedding video.

“The mouse is back,” she said, pointing at what I thought was a blank shelf. Turns out, if you looked closely, you could see that a mouse had left numerous little nasty calling cards on the shelf. Though it was never spoken, it was very clear that this would be my mess to clean up, seeing as how I was the one who let the little buggers live in the first place.

After I finished my chores, my wife and I discussed ways of removing the rodent. I suggested we use the live traps again. They were very effective in catching them the first time. My wife thought we try some other methods. I’m not positive, but I think she may have been seeking a more punitive solution, because her ideas included flame thrower, napalm, and the release of Hutu warriors into the pantry.

Eventually, I convinced her to let the issue lie dormant until the next day. Actually, I told her that I wanted to “monitor the situation,” like I’m some sort of mouse extraction expert or something, and I was doing high-tech surveillance on them. I was pretty much hoping that the mouse would just let himself out, and I would never have to actually deal with the method. Besides, do you know how hard it is to find a flame thrower?

Settling into bed that evening, I quietly hoped to myself that our little friend was gone. In fact, I think I was having happy mouse dreams about 3:30 am when I was awoken with, “MICHAEL!!!! WAKE UP!!!”

As if the yelling wasn’t enough, my wife was also poking me in the side with her finger. I groggily awoke. Then I heard another voice. And it said, “Mewwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!!!”

At the foot of our bed was our cat, Delilah, baying loudly at us. My wife had apparently already gotten to see what our cat was so excited about. Let’s just say that we weren’t going to have to worry about releasing any live mice into the wild.

Since Delilah’s tally, we have yet to see any more evidence of our rodent visitors. Hopefully, they’re gone for good. I, for one, hope they stay away. Do you know what kind of damage a flame thrower can do in a pantry?