game on

Every year like clockwork, as the weather chills, the mice that are supposed to live OUTSIDE, start looking for warmer climes, most notably INSIDE MY HOUSE. A place mice should never ever be. Ever. There are some rules that should never be broken.

Theirs is a subtle campaign, those rodents. You don’t even know they’ve breached the perimeter. Then there’s the whisper of furtive sounds late in the night that make me question my sanity. Then food supplies are stolen. Dry kibble from the dog’s bowl disappears, one nugget at a time. Then comes the irrefutable proof that we’ve been invaded, a brazen intruder blows cover and someone in the house is witness and the WE HAVE MICE alarm goes all DEFCON 1.

Then the chase is on.

One would like to think the dog would be annoyed about some rodent stealing her food and DO SOMETHING about it, like eat them, but I guess once a dog has taken on the gopher population of the neighborhood mice are beneath her notice. Which leads me to question her place in the household if she can’t bestir herself to deal with mice.

So, since I have to strategize this little nuisance war myself, I hauled myself off to Home Depot to buy a mountain of mousetraps, because you know there is never just one mouse. It’s a whole mouse platoon that bivouacs for the winter in my walls.

Home Depot also happened to be selling Christmas stuff so I bought the cutest Cardinal print doormatt and some holiday window clings for the kid’s rooms because well it’s that time of year and I have no willpower to resist the Cardinal. Really, none whatsoever.

After careful reconassaince, I reinforced our defenses with six mousetraps, several grouped in key areas identified as perimeter breaches by the icky evidence of mouse poop. Which, just eewww, right?

I gathered up some peanut butter and a crushed dog cookie, because my daughter and husband found a dog cookie in the storage drawer of the stove that had clearly been nibbled on. Don’t ask me how the dog cookie got in the drawer, because I know I didn’t put it there and the stupid dog would dismantle a car to get to a treat if she knew it was close at hand. I think the mice stashed it there for emergency rations, those little bastards.

With that mix of peanut butter and dog cookie pieces, the traps were loaded and set. Gently (because having one of those suckers snap on your hand hurts, really really hurts, and leaves blood blisters and bruises) placing them in the appointed positions, we trooped off to see the recent Harry Potter movie, placing bets on how many would be captured when we got back to the house. I estimated at two, maybe three would fall into my traps and set up a warning that we were fighting to take back our territory. The rest of my company was not as optimistic as I was and figured one might be sent out to investigate the change in the local landscape, perhaps sensing a trap. I zipped into the house when we returned from the movie to revel in my mouse catching skills and found a BIG FAT ZERO.

Not only did I not get one single mouse in a trap but the nasty vermin cleared the pressure plate of every lick of peanut butter/dog cookie paste WITHOUT setting off a single trap. Cleaned them off so completely that it looked as if they had never been set. They had taken sustenance from the tools of their demise and laughed, I’m sure, all the way back to their holes in the wall.


Mice 1 – Catootes 0

This war, it is SO ON.