A Mouse Tale

When the mouse laughs at the cat, there's a hole nearby.
― Nigerian Proverb

The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
― Willie Nelson

I can always tell when the mother in law's coming to stay; the mice throw themselves on the traps.
— Les Dawson

Only on a few rare occasions, when I was either very tired or the weather was just terrible, did I sleep in shelters. The mice rule the shelters, and if there are no mice, that’s because there are lots of snakes eating the mice…take your pick.
― Dennis R. Blanchard

First of all, just to be clear, the above picture is not the mouse in question.

Ever since we had that mouse problem (more than a year ago) we’ve kept a couple of traps in the basement. I’m not even sure there’s bait in them, but we’ve also left a couple of plates of mouse bait down there. And by basement I mean the laundry room and furnace room, which has a door that shuts firmly to keep curious kittens out.

Several months ago, I went downstairs to get something out of the freezer and there was a dead mouse in the trap near the furnace. I let the hubby know and he disposed of the corpse. I do not know how or where, nor do I want to.

Nothing else happened for the longest time until several days ago when I once again went down to get something out of the freezer, and once again there was a dead mouse in the trap. And it couldn’t have been the brightest mouse in the world because the hubby never re-baited the trap.

Saturday was a grey, miserable, rainy day. The hubby was off to the bowling alley to ride herd on the kids in the youth league, and I decided it was a good day to work in my office down the hall. The kittens came down with me to try to cause trouble, as is their way, but I ignored them and they soon wandered off to cause trouble elsewhere.

I could hear them at the other end of the house, and periodically I’d go check on them to make sure they weren’t getting into something they shouldn’t. Mostly they were just running races and fighting over toys. And then I realized that the one toy they were playing with was a dead mouse.

Ewwww!

Unwilling to touch it myself, and not wanting them to eat it. I got a heavy glass bowl to put over it, heavy enough they couldn’t push it off, and figured on letting the hubby dispose of it when he got home. That’s the man’s job, right?

So I went back down the hall to my office, leaving the wound-up kittens to their playing, and went back to work. A short while later they sounded like they were doing something they weren’t supposed to be, and I went to check on them again.

They had another mouse. And this one was still alive!

In the time it took for me to find a pair of gardening gloves and something to trap the mouse in, the group had moved from the hallway near the kitchen to the stairs going down to the basement.

Judging by the squeaks, the mouse was still alive, so I scooped it up and put it in my big canning pot, put the lid on it, and put it up on the stove – the kittens were unaware of where it was. And there it sat until the hubby came home.

I was reluctant to release it outside because it was pouring rain. But since I really couldn’t keep it inside either . . . I took it to the very back of the yard (it’s a big yard) to where we had a wooden box filled with wood and let it go there. It seemed to be moving okay, if not slowly, and went under the box where it was dry.

And then, of course, I worried about the poor little mouse all by itself in the big, scary world. It’s a good thing we no longer had a rodent sized container for it or I might have been tempted to keep it. They were smaller than the mouse that was trapped earlier in the week. I figure that one was the mother and these two were her offspring – they weren’t full grown and had probably ventured upstairs looking for their mother.

And the moral of the story? I shouldn’t try working in my office when there’s only me and the kittens around because bad things will happen

Mouse Tale

The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
― Willie Nelson

When the mouse laughs at the cat, there's a hole nearby.
― Nigerian Proverb

I can always tell when the mother in law's coming to stay; the mice throw themselves on the traps.
— Les Dawson

A few years ago, we had a mouse problem. They’d gotten into the bank of cupboards along the outer wall of the kitchen where the sink is. Mostly in the cupboards, upper and lower, between the wall and the stove. Between the cat, Dante, and the traps, we pretty much took care of the problem: Dante – 4, traps – 2.

We have since renovated the kitchen, and the cupboards and floors were all replaced. The kitchen was pretty much mouse-proof. So we thought.

A few weeks ago we discovered mouse dirt in the drawer in the bottom of the stove where we kept our pots. I say “kept” because as soon as I saw it I removed the pots, washed them thoroughly, and put them in a plastic bin with a snap down lid. The hubby left a paper plate full of mouse bait in their place.

We waited patiently for the mouse bait to do it’s thing, but there were a couple of times I thought I heard a rustling in a dark corner of the dining room where the bookcases almost butt up to the deck door. There’s a plant stand there as well, with a stack of plastic bins in between.

The hubby thought I was hearing things, until the morning I got up and found this waiting for me on the floor near the coffee station in the kitchen:

Nineteen years old and Dante’s still got the right stuff.

Then a couple of days later I went into the lower corner cupboard in the kitchen (where I keep my baking stuff) to get some flour to make bread – you guessed it, I found mouse dirt on the lower lazy susan. The thing is, I was in that cupboard a couple of days prior and didn’t see anything amiss.

I had one plastic bin with a snap down lid that held things like icing sugar, chocolate chips, coconut, etc. and it, of course, was untouched. And I kept the whole wheat flour, sugar, and oatmeal in air tight containers so I felt confident it wasn’t touched either. Everything else got checked carefully; most of it got thrown out just on principle.

Strangely, the mice didn’t appear to have made it to the upper lazy susan, but then other than spices, that’s where I keep my baking utensils. I have since purchased more tall, narrow plastic bins with snap down lids to hold my baking supplies.

Meanwhile, I’m still hearing a rustling in the evenings in that dark corner of the dining room. And then one night I spy a strange shadow out of the corner of my eye. It seemed to be on the vertical blind near the bookcase. My eyes not being the best, I stared at the blind and sure enough, it was a mouse climbing up and down.

So . . . the hubby dug out the single mouse trap we still owned, and baited it with crunchy peanut butter, placing it behind the stack of bins in the space between the bins and the glass spacer of the deck door.

I’m sure it wasn’t even a hour before we heard a loud snap from that corner. Sure enough, there was a mouse corpse. The hubby took the trap outside and disposed of the corpse, then reset it and put it back behind the bins. Another snap, and another dead mouse.

To date, we have gotten rid of nine mice, counting the one Dante got. The trap hasn’t seen any action for the last couple of days, so we’re cautiously optimistic that we’ve dealt with them all.

But that’s not quite the end of my story. Unbeknownst to me, when the hubby got rid of the mouse corpses, all he did was toss them over the rail of the deck. But here’s the thing. They kept disappearing. So who was cleaning up our mouse pile for us?

A couple of days after the first mouse went over the rail, a young raccoon paid a visit to our deck and was hanging around as though looking for something. Mystery solved.

I guess they don’t call them trash pandas for nothing.