My wife is deathly afraid of mice.
So I knew there would be trouble when some movement over by the paper shredder caught my eye this afternoon. I turned to see a little gray mouse gazing back at me, sitting up on his haunches and twitching his nose.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" I asked him. He responded by scurrying out of the office door and out of sight.
I waited through dinner to broach the subject with Maria, who had me setting traps upstairs and down a few weeks ago after she glimpsed a mouse in the bedroom.
She was upstairs on a cordless phone making family Thanksgiving plans with her paramedic brother a few minutes ago when I heard her shriek. I knew right away what was up, even before I heard the word "mouse."
She insisted that I rebait the traps and set them near her closet, which is where the mouse fled after she shrieked.
Retrieving the trap from under her dresser, I discovered a very dead and somewhat smelly mouse, the steel bar of the trap having caved in his little skull. I hadn't looked at the trap for several days and, since we didn't hear it snap, we just supposed our trapping efforts were fruitless.
I carried the trap and the fruit of our trapping out to the far side of the driveway and dropped the dead mouse where I hope a neighborhood cat will find it.
The trap has been re-baited with Jif smooth peanut butter, reset and positioned near Maria's closet.
I am confident the trap will claim the most recent offender within the next day or two.
I hold no particular malice toward mice, but I think catch-and-release is a stupid waste of time. So I have no problem with killing things that don't belong in my house.
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Update, 90 minutes later: We came upstairs after watching TV and found a dead mouse in my freshly set trap. This one went down the toilet.
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