>The Uninvited Guest
>I actually had a lot of free time today, but I couldn’t think of anything interesting to write. Everything I came up with seemed so… schmaltzy.
A very Happy New Year to you and yours!
Or cliched.
I’ve come up with several New Years Resolutions that I’d like to share with you:
Sadly, I decided, I had nothing worthwhile to report to the world on this first day of 2007. Until finally, this evening, I was cleaning up in the kitchen after dinner when…
“What the…!” Hubs said from the den.
“What?” I asked. “What’s going on in there?”
“Nothing,” he said. The USC game was on and he didn’t want to miss it. Finally, during a commercial break, he came into the kitchen.
“We have a mouse in the house.”
“WHAT?!”
“It just ran from the kitchen into the sunroom.”
“It was in here?!”
“Yep.”
I ran to the sunroom, closed the french doors and stuffed dishrags in the cracks.
“You’ve got to get it out of there!!” I yelped.
Now there was a time when a silly old mouse wouldn’t have fazed me. But that time ended when Hubs brought me outside a few years ago to see a mouse that had made its way into our garage. As he brushed it out of a corner with a broom, that filthy little furball ran faster than a Baptist spinster whose polyester pantsuit bottoms have split down the middle. I knew then and there that if I ever saw one of those things zip across my kitchen, I would freak. The hell. Out.
However, I was confident that would never happen. Because only dirty, poor people have mice. Not floor mopping, Dyson-freak me.
Ahem.
“Get it out of there!!” I repeated, near hysterics.
Nonchalantly, Hubs went into the sunroom with a broom while 16, Baby and I watched through the door windows.
“Whass Daddy doing?” Baby asked.
“He’s looking for a mouse,” I said.
“Oh!” Recognition dawned in her eyes. “The mouse went under there.” She pointed to a small chest under our television, right next to the sunroom. There was just enough space under the chest for a mouse to hide.
“A mouse?” I asked. Two-year-olds, after all, aren’t to be trusted.
“Yes,” she said. “I were so scared.”
Suddenly, I remembered that during dinner, she had run into the dining room out of breath, shouting, “Mommy, I saw it! I saw it! I were so scared, Daddy!” I figured at the time that she was talking about something she’d seen on TV in the den. Now, I realized, she had seen The Mouse.
“What color was it?” 16 asked skeptically after I’d checked under the chest to make sure no mice were hiding underneath.
“It were gray,” she said decisively.
She was right.
Still inside the sunroom, Hubs pushed a few pieces of furniture around, then came back out.
“It’s gone,” he announced. “It probably went down the vent. I’m sure that’s how it got in.”
Hubs’s laissez faire attitude toward our disease-ridden vermin problem was, obviously, unacceptable.
“I’m going to the grocery right now to get mouse traps,” I announced. “I can’t live with a mouse in this house.”
And that’s how I ended up buying out the mouse trap stock at Kroger on New Year’s Night, 2007.
The mouse has got to go.
>I completely agree with you!!! YUCK- MICE!!
>In y college days I worked in a green house. THey left out poison for the mice to find and we would often find dead mice laying around in the gravel. I was the only one of my crew who wasn’t too squeamish to deal with them. I actually didn’t mind at all because because I had to walk to the office, get a mask and gloves and a bag and walk back to pick up the mouse and then walk to the dumpster, all in all a nice break from thinning baby trees, except for the part with the mouse corpse.
>I just found a mouse in my hall closet a few days ago. I think my mouse came inside because it was warmer in my house then outside.A few years ago, we had a mouse problem in the garage (I stored summer stuff in there, so I wasn’t in there all winter and they mated). I lost count after we caught about 23 mice in less then two weeks.By far, the VERY best traps are the sticky traps, and the “trick” to catching mice is putting out a lot of traps up front (average of 1-2 per room).Aren’t they awful little things? Let us know if you catch him!
>EW! EW! EW! We had a mouse once. I’ll never forget watching it scurry across my living room a few times before I even realized what it was. Those things are F-A-S-T!!! I hope you catch it soon. And, most importantly, when Hubs is home to dispose of it. **shudder**
>ewww, we had a family of mice in our house once. Obvsiously they like cheese but they get stuck with the peanut butter. Hope that helps ya catch your mouse.
>We lived on a large field a while back and had a bad mouse problem. I, luckily, have a cat who loves to hunt. The sticky traps worked great for us…until the mouse just got stuck, without eating the little poison seed. So, we had this compeletely alive mouse STUCK to a little plastic case. I’ll spare the details, but they WERE NOT PRETTY. If your hubs will deal with the remains, I guess I wouldn’t worry, but otherwise, I’d get the box trap. You can take them FAR, FAR away, open it and let them go and not have to deal with the whole ickiness of it all.
>The house behind us burned down, and it took the damn insurance company three months to finally sign off on it being torn down. Three months!When they finally did tear it down, we ended up with not a mouse problem, but a RAT problem. We could hear them gnawing around the pipes at night. It was awful. I lost a little of my sanity. We shelled out the big bucks and now they’re all gone. Thank God, because rats + pregnant woman = very, very bad combination. Horomones and vermin don’t mix.
>Gah. I can handle snakes. But not mice. I don’t know why. Creepy little snits.
>Glue traps are cruel and shouldn’t be used as the mouse will just sit there until he chews off whatever is stuck and/or dies. NASTY. Snap traps are much better and SO much more humane.Glue traps should be illegal.
>LMAO!!!And not because you have a filthy little rodent callling your house it’s home.But because this post could have been mine!!Just the other day I thought I saw a little grey furball skitter across my floor.I knew I was right when Nixon, the World’s Greatest Dog. Ever. started barking hysterically at the closet door.Now I too, have a disease-riddled rodent living in my home and mouse traps everywhere.But at least I call myself a redneck. It could be construed that it is par for the course in our neck of the woods. What’s yer excuse? Wink, wink.
>I read about glue traps (after almost buying them- the old-fashioned mousetraps aren’t very practical with a two-year-old in the house) and am SOOO glad I didn’t buy them. Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. Both on my own selfish end and on the mouse’s. You’re right. The glue traps should be outlawed.
>Any luck yet? Try baiting the trap with peanut butter…I’m sure you’ll catch it when your husband isn’t home to uh, clean up the splatter. Good luck!
>Ok, there’s something going around. We don’t even live in the same state and I had the exact same thing going down in mi casa last week. My husband was a man obsessed for an entire week. We have set every trap known to man and he swears this tiny little mouse is mocking him. We finally caught it last night and he has been on cloud nine all day. Oh, boy.
>We moved into our house in Minnesota in the middle of a VERY cold winter. Between the last owners moving out and us moving in, the mice decided inside was much warmer than outside. our first 9 days in the house we caught 13 mice. Moving from Texas to Minnesota in December, then dealing with all those mice – I WAS NOT HAPPY!
>We had a “mouse” problem when we lived in Ohio a few years ago. The stinkin’ thing got on the beds and left poop, chewed up the blinds, left turquiose poop (the same color as the poison my husband left out to kill it) all over the place, and let itself be seen for a split second over and over again. Thinking it was a big, pregnant rat, I went and bought rat traps, put peanut butter on them, and decided that if it wasn’t caught after 2 hours, then my 4 kids and I would go to a hotel.It worked, only it turned out to be a CHIPMUNK… and my kids cried because Mommy was so mean to a cute chipmunk.Sheesh.
>omg! I know, I know what you feel!! we had one very recently…http://adventures-in-motherhood.com/article/mouse-in-the-house try mousetrap with peanut butter.
>I miss my mouser.Oh–no, I have my cat. My ex, unfortunately, has the only creature of mine that will de-mouse a house–my Beagle.
>Ohhhh I feel your pain. I moved out of my house for 2 weeks in 2001, with my 4 year old, because I was terrified of the thing running across my precious little child while she slept.ok… I had the “do mice climb bedskirts” thought too.We went out and got a cat. Seriously. No mice since.