Good morning!
It happens every year. Hubby goes on a quest to climb mountains in the autumn, and the kids and I are left to our own devices without supervision. It's become quite the family joke, noting whatever weirdness happens when Hubby's out on vacation.
Here are some of the highlights of past years:
1) Skippy's car basically split in half...a block from home...in the pouring rain...a day before Skippy was leaving for a road trip. (The Mighty Cube went to Nashville that year.)
2) A rat turned up dead in the garage. Had to have the neighbor remove it because, well, the kids and I don't do dead animals.
3) Peaches shaved her head, and I had to help...even though I swore I wasn't going to.
4) My weed clearing project basically turned into an attempt to set fire to everything in the back yard.
5) My aunt died.
I mean, seriously...you cannot make this up.
Which is why it was NO SURPRISE that last night, while Peaches and I were catching up on the new episodes of "YOU," Peaches paused the remote and said, "Tell me Rocket is playing with a toy."
We turned the lights on and then noted no... Rocket, our "mighty hunter" cat, was NOT playing with a toy. At least, not a toy we'd purchased for him.
It was a mouse.
A real live mouse. Not one with its head torn off. Not one that died of a heart attack when it got a look of our army of cats. Not even one he found on the back porch and was toying with. (All these things have happened. But that's the complete list of rodent infestations we've had in the 19 years we've lived here. So...I guess we were due.)
So there's Rocket, the mighty hunter, sitting in front of this wee critter, pawing at it every couple seconds. In my house. In front of my television. While I'm sitting there eating Chinese food and drinking saki. (Okay, Peaches was drinking saki. I'm still nursing mouth burn from my antibiotics for my ear...that's another story.)
Now, okay, Peaches and I are not squeaky, frightened, girlie girls.
At least, we didn't think so.
Hannah moved first. "We are smart, capable women," she said.
"Get a big bowl," I said.
I, of course, thought this would be like that situation in "Friends" where Rachel has to trap a pigeon.
This was not that. (Rachel and the pigeon video.)
It started out simply. Peaches got the big popcorn bowl (we first had to decide if we wanted to use the big plastic microwave pot or the ancient mixing bowl. I opted for the mixing bowl...but Peaches got both out, so thusly started the deconstruction of the house) I picked up the cat (no small thing, he's a chunk) and she'd slam down the bowl, trapping the mouse. We then would slide the cardboard from the bag of Chinese food under the bowl and walk the mouse out.
It worked for Rachel Green. And, as Peaches kept saying, "we are smart, capable women."
We moved Rocket to another room. Taco, our other cat, was comfortably perched on his cat tree, watching the whole thing without taking part.
Here's the thing though: When dealing with a wild animal, one should be ready for anything. Like, maybe the mouse didn't want to be trapped under a big glass bowl. (He did not.) Instead, he found a hiding place within the crevices of our tree stump coffee table.
Okay. This table weighs a metric ton. Moving it, even for two smart, capable women, is a trick. And when there's a wild animal involved, one we do not want to crush (because that would be so much of a worse situation, note what I said about the dead rat. I was not about to call the neighbor...again. I mean, it was only 8:00PM, sure, but I have yet to live down the screams of horror emitting from my face as he picked up the rat corpse and carried it out of the garage.)
We shifted the table a bit, revealing the mouse again. This time, while we were screeching like children, he skittered across my FOOT, along the wall, and under a corner shelf.
Not the worst thing. The worst thing is if he got under my beloved couch. I'd never be able to sit there again.
This time, Peaches had an idea. "Let's build a wall and funnel him to the patio door."
BRILLIANT!
So we built a bit of a mouse trail with books and whatever else we had. I included a soft sided cat tent as part of the wall. I mean, it's a tiny little mouse. He's not going to plow under the one small section of this brilliant wall and sneak in a direction we don't want him to go, right? Of course not. That's crazy talk!
Once the wall was finished, Peaches lifted the corner shelf and put that to the side. The wee hunted mouse was plastered tight against the wall, not moving. She used a long-handled cat toy and poked the mouse. "Come on buddy," she said. "Come on...Buddy?"
Oh boy. Do we have yet another mouse that's died of fright?
But no. I could tell this one was still alive. "Get the handle behind him, against the wall," I told Peaches. "Poke him away from the wall."
Worked like a charm.
Except for one thing: The minute he moved, we screeched again. He skittered down the trail we'd built toward the door and we were screaming both from fear and amazement that we'd succeeded! WE ARE SMART AND CAPABLE WOMEN!
And we thought we had it...until we didn't.
Remember that soft sided cat house? Yeah, that mouse snuck right under that. I could have trapped him with my foot. I could have. I was too busy running away screaming.
At this point, once Peaches and I regrouped, we realized the mouse was in one of two places:
1) He escaped into the torn underlining of the footstool:
2) He was under the couch.
If he's in the footstool, we reasoned, we just put the footstool on the porch and close the porch. Done.
If he's under the couch, he can live quite happily given my love for snacks and my dislike for housekeeping.
"Get a scissors and cut out the lining," I say to Peaches, who is now waving a flashlight around light some kind of Republican in the Watergate Hotel. She's got better knees than I do, so she got on the ground and started pointing the flashlight under the couch and under everything else.
I proceeded to sift through all the blankets, pillows, small pieces of furniture, and stacking them where ever I could, mostly on the couch and the big easy chair.
Hannah moved the footstool out to the patio. While out there, she studied the walls to find where this guy had gotten in. Meanwhile, I fired off a text to Hubby, hoping for some idea how to manage this.
"Don't we have two cats?" That was his helpful suggestion. That was followed with, "Peaches is familiar with traps."
"Hey, Peaches. So, Dad says you're familiar with traps."
She gives me what one can only describe as a "WITHERING" look. Yes, she has set rodent traps. But she also calls her boss to come empty them when needed.
"Traps are $12 a dozen on Amazon," was another helpful text from the Rockies.
"That doesn't help me NOW," I responded.
"Go to Walmart."
Let's ignore the fact that between the saki and the fact that we were in our jammies we were not okay to go outside the house. I was not about to leave my domicile with Wild Kingdom running around. Who knows how many of his little mice buddies he'd have in the house by the time we got back?
Besides, I have trauma from the days when we'd trap mice in our house growing up. I should note, my mom, also a smart and capable woman, called my dad at work to come home and dispose of the dead mouse behind the couch. So yeah, trip to Walmart was out. But, we took a breather and scanned Amazon and decided we'd order a live trap. I know I'm able to empty a live trap rather than toss a trap full of dead mouse. I AM A SMART AND CAPABLE WOMAN.
Peaches had an idea, "Let me call my friend Amy, she's good with animals."
Amy is a friend Peaches has had since grade school. She owns a rat and an assortment of other critters. Peaches facetimed her. After quite a bit of laughing, Amy had zero suggestions.
At this point we'd been trying to trap this guy for almost an hour. I kept saying, "I'm not sleeping in this house until we get him out of here." Hey, I've been camping. I've raised children. I've babysat all manner of kids and I've owned different kinds of animals. I've probably slept in a house with an active mouse situation a hundred times.
Peaches had another idea. "Let's release Rocket. He'll find the mouse again."
That seemed as likely as anything else, so we did. We released the beast. The beast who was very good at sniffing out where the mouse HAD BEEN, but not where he was. Instead, this mighty hunter got distracted by all the rearranged furniture and blankets. He got all caught up in exploring the new floor plan of the living room. Useless beast.
I sat on my spot on the couch. "I guess we just wait now until he comes out again."
I was fully ready to wait the mouse out. Let him run across my lap while I was watching TV. I would catch him. I AM A SMART AND CAPABLE WOMAN! But I was also quite tired of moving stuff around and I wanted to finish the episode of "YOU," we'd interrupted to catch the mouse.
We were almost settled back in our spots when Peaches glanced out the patio door. "There he is!"
Sure enough, he'd hidden in the underlining of the footstool and was now running circles in the patio. But he was really running circles. Almost like...
"I hope we didn't give him a concussion!" Peaches says, fully concerned now that the wild animal was almost back where he belonged. "How's he going to get out of the porch?"
That was the next problem. On Hubby's advice, I'd blocked the hole we found with a wad of steel wool. The best, easiest way for Mr. Mouse to leave was to reopen his route. But I was not about to go out there. "I'll hold Rocket," I said.
Nope, I am not all that brave.
Peaches went out, removed the steel wool, and we closed the patio door, much to Rocket's ire. He spent the next half hour staring out the patio door, watching the mouse run in circles. We finally pulled the curtain closed. Rocket snuck behind the curtain. Honestly, I thought if he hadn't already proven to be such a waste of a hunter, I would have turned him loose on the porch and let him have the best night ever.
As it was, the living room and parts of the kitchen looked like the dining room scene from "The Miracle Worker."
We settled down and finished the episode, congratulating ourselves on getting the drama out of the way so early in Hubby's trip. Now it'll be smooth going the whole time he's gone.
Sure.
