Mousecatching

You know, I always feel self-conscious about talking about the mice in our house, as though people are outraged that I have mice in my house.  Yet they aren’t.

I think we’re moving into an endgame.  I hope.

The fight against the mice is hampered by the necessity to not actually kill them; killing them upsets my husband and daughter.  I do a little cheer and a little dance every time the cat catches one.  (My daughter’s the type who gets upset whenever I pull weeds.  “They have flowers, too.”  I think Lee is on the side of the mice.)  I bought a covered trash and gave up on the homebrew mousetrap we had set up – I bought prebuilt humane mice traps instead.

The mice can climb anything, apparently.  I have seen them climb the WALLS (granted, it was one of the walls in the main room, with rough wood paneling).  I have seen them scale electrical cords faster than Jackie Chan.  They can, when it comes to getting into eighteen-in-high trash cans with sloping sides, apparently fly.

I caught one yesterday and two this morning.  I let the one go right outside the door yesterday; he beelined for a dark spot on the outside wall of the great room that turned out to be a hole.  Nice.  I have to say, I just love the people who did all the custom work on our place.  It’s so inspirationally half-assed.  But that’s home ownership:  just when you think you have it under control, you find another problem.

So the two from last night are in a covered plastic tote so I can haul them out to a field away from the house.  I’m glad I put them in there; one of them just escaped from his trap and is now wandering directly inside the tote, to the frustration of the cat.  I can’t tell from here whether it managed to lift one of the door of whether it chewed its way out; from the sounds last night, it sounds like they tried.

And so, later this morning, Ray and I will drive out to a field near someone else’s home and release the mice.  Fly free, little mice!  I hope you’re swiftly eaten by something with a large beak.

Update: The two mice from this morning escaped, probably while I was typing the original entry.  It’s a whole ‘nother story, but there was a tiny HOLE in the lid of the tote, and when I went to check on them, they were both gone.  I caught another one (or maybe one of the two that escaped) and immediately took it down the street.  It ran across the street, then ran back and forth against the opposite curb for a few laps, chittering loudly, before jumping the curb and making  a beeline for someone else’s house.