Last night, as I was embroiled in the extensive PhotoShopping of those darn headstones with indifferent results (it doesn't help that all the program's filters are missing, and that nearly identical files refused to behave identically), I heard a sudden clatter, followed by frantic squeaking. I knew immediately what it was. One of John's mouse traps had snapped on a mouse - and the mouse wasn't dead.I came into the tv room (den, fireplace room...we've never settled on a name for this room we spend so much time in) in time to see the mouse trap moving across the floor, the poor mouse pathetically trying to get away with the trap still attached ti its foot. John watched, unsure what to do. I started crying, begging him to do something. Kill it outright, let it go outside--something! Then I left the room. I couldn't stand it. I didn't want to know.
John said afterward that he couldn't have let it go outside. It would have just come back in. We don't know how, but we think they come in through the closet in my office here. This was the second or third mouse caught in as many days. John worries that at some point we'll discover that they've eatern something irreplaceable. Hey, maybe that's what happened to my 25-year-old map of Mâvarin, which has been missing for the last several years. Nah.
Now, John is at least as tender-hearted about animals as I am. He told me recently that he's got a lizard living in "his" bathroom. Me, I'd put it outside, but he let it stay, hoping it would eat the bugs.
Yeah, we've got bugs, too. We seldom get black widows inside and I don't think we've had a single scorpion, but we do get other spiders and a variety of insects. When a cricket or one of the tiny black erzatz ladybugs with yellow-green spots turns up in my bathtub I usually catch it and put it out the window. I sometimes do the same with a lizard or a gecko. I once did it with a mouse. Boy, did that thing leave a mess.
But we can't have mice in the house. Can't do it.
"Can't we get some kind of humane trap?" I asked John.
"Wecould," John said, "but those kill the mice, too."
Karen
You are looking at an archive edition of 
5 comments:
"...and then the mice attracted the snakes and we just had to move." LOL a familiar story. Don't wait for the snakes. Get a professional exterminator.
We have mice too...but they have not entered the house this fall yet! Just a matter of time.
When I had mice in one apartment I lived in, we used the plastic traps. The mouse basically has to stick its head inside, and so it snapped the neck 100% of the time, never the foot. We also used peanut butter as bait, so the critters couldn't grab it fast and run off.
I always kind of found it ironic that the roommate who had pet rats (me) was always the one killing the rodents in the house.
We get so many strange bugs - especially when it's wet. We've just taken to the phrase, "bug du jour." Most of them stay outdoors, but one does get inside occasionally, much to the delight of the cats. So far we haven't had to deal with rodents, but I did see a rat the size of a Buick (it sure seemed that large) in the alley one day. Scared me to death. We're not far from a wooded area, so I'm hoping the rat just strayed a bit, like the largish turtle we found in our yard one day. We put that in a box and took it to the pond in the park. You won't catch me doing that with the rat!
And so the contest is on, through the ages, still not found a replacement for the fearless feline... the inventors call to duty... to build a better mousetrap!
Post a Comment