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No, I don’t want a cat
April! It’s almost done. By Saturday we’ll be staring May in the kisser. The April Showers arrived and encouraged the irises and lilies to poke through the ground. Our yard birds are twitter-pated and LOML and I making plans to spend a bit more time out-of-doors. We are tired of the home improvement shows and we’ve binged all of the whodunits on pay television. We are so done with wintry weather. As it turns out, the most exciting thing we’ve dealt with, recently, is a mouse who’s smart enough to get the peanut butter off the trap without springing it. Who knows, the mouse probably has a huge family someplace in “this old house”. There’s never just one, right? And it isn’t the first mouse we’ve encountered in our thirty-six years here. As a matter of fact, we’ve had all manner of wildlife inside this house— other than our children when they were teenagers—mostly bats, birds and mice. Bats and birds have been carefully removed from the premises. But mice!!! ARRRGH. Our house is well over a hundred years old and much of the foundation is stone, so think nooks and crannies. We’ve got oodles of nooks and crannies.
Over the years LOML and I had a cat or two whose job was to keep the rodents at bay. Actually, the last cat was our youngest child’s pet. If you’re a parent, you know the kind of pet a kid has. “Oh Mommy, I promise to clean his litter box and feed him and make sure there’s water in his bowl. I won’t let him outside and I’ll go with you when he gets neutered and has to have his shots.” Well, let’s just say it wasn’t our first “pet” rodeo and we knew who was really going to be the the cat wrangler. But Cleo did a stellar job for his thirteen years in this house. What? Why don’t we get another cat? Well, truth be told, LOML and I like to travel and leaving the cat at the Cat Spa when we were away was a very expensive deal. When we travelled we actually had to factor boarding the cat into the overall cost of a trip. He did a great job of keeping the mouse population down, but he was a big ticket item, sometimes. So we are cat-free, but we have become experts in the use of mouse traps—that is until April 2022. We seem to have a crafty little bugger living somewhere in our house and s/he has got us on the ropes, or the snap.
So, April 2022 has become the Month of the Mouse (well, among other things). Several times the trap has been set with peanut butter smeared on the snappy part, and twice the peanut butter has disappeared and the unsprung trap sits there, sans carcass. We know it’s a mouse because s/he leaves behind oodles of little calling cards near the trap. Does the trap work? You bet yer boots it does. Whenever I’ve gloved up to remove the poop and tried to put more peanut butter on the snappy part, I’ve just about lost a finger. Yep, the trap works. We’re dealing with a hungry, poopy, annoying Mensa Mouse. S/he may have been a mechanical engineer in its other life. The only snap we’ve heard recently is one followed by a “#@$%&#$@” in a loud voice, which sounds a whole lot like my loud voice. Like I said earlier “this isn’t our first rodeo with rodents”. When we moved to the County in 1972 we rented a big ole house complete with enough mice to keep every cat in Ontario fed and fat. Up to that point, I’d never dealt with mice. Seriously, it was a new game to me. A brand new friend, Madeline, explained the situation to me. I had suggested there was a lot of flies in our house, she saw the poop and said “No fly would be able to fly if it had poop that big. That’s mouse poop.” We immediately acquired a cat, from another new friend, and our problems quickly disappeared.
Mouse problems, we got’em, again. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve emptied the lower kitchen cabinets, and drawers, and cleaned out mouse poop, washed and disinfected everything, then put it all back, only to repeat the process the next day. Many, many times would be my closest guess. This morning, I’ve switched up my trap game. I’m hoping this “new trap” will do the trick. What’s that you ask? Have I ever considered live trapping and releasing the mousey into the yard. No, I’m not running a fast food drive-through. As soon as the weather warms up a bit, I’ll be revisiting all of the nooks and crannies with a can of expansion foam.
Seriously, you thought I’d be onboard for a rodent catch-and-release? You don’t know me very well!
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