Mice Wars

Rob was visiting our neighbour the other day and came back armed with a mouse trap. Not any old mouse trap, but a state of the art "Humane Trap".  A shame really, because I am much more partial to the kind which requires Rob to set the bait, while we sit in the next room and silently count down to the point where it snaps his fingers, and then snicker quietly as he swears and howls with pain and then repeats the process. It never gets old. 

Anyway, our war on the mice continues. We were sitting in the basement the other evening, all else was quiet except for the party that was being thrown in between the ceiling and the upstairs floor. It was one hell of a racket, I'm not sure how many mice were up there, but they sure sounded like they were having fun. I was half expecting mini balloons and confetti to come drifting down through the gaps in the wood plank ceiling.  

Rob decided it was time to fight back, hence the latest mouse trap.  Please excuse me while I don't get too excited about this. He of little memory seems to have clear forgotten about our first disastrous episode with the humane (read useless) trap. This is not to be confused with my last posted blog on mouse catching - which I think was actually a while ago - which was another episode entirely.  

Anyway, old house, plaster walls and mice will often get trapped within them, die and then stink up the place for two weeks. Not too much you can do about it until I had the brilliant idea of cutting a hole in the wall and thus allowing the mouse to exit the wall into the said trap. You'll notice my ideas are always brilliant, his, not so much. 

That was the grand plan, but as so often happens in our house, the mouse - or should I say mice - had other ideas, because after the hole was cut in the wall and the trap positioned in front of it, not one, not two but three mice gaily trooped straight through the trap and into the kitchen. It was like a Macey's freaking parade. 

The cats - count them we have four - are nowhere to be seen. So it is up to me to take care of the mouse round up, as I frantically throw bowls and buckets around the room in a desperate attempt to trap the little rodent bastards beneath the containers. You may well ask where my husband is during this chaos ? He was in the next room of course, on top of a chair ineffectively calling out directions. If over the quarter century that we have been married, we ever came close to divorce, that evening would have been it. 

Surprisingly, I did manage to capture two of the offenders, and the cats eventually took care of the third. I'm not sure exactly what Rob plans on doing with this latest trap, but rest assured, what ever it is, he is doing it on his own. 

Authors Note: Rob of course remembers this episode differently. He insists he wasn't on top of a chair. Whatever.