Friday Night Leftovers The Mouse Edition

OH YES!

I said it. We are having a mouse edition here people!

• I thought I heard scratching a week or so ago. But I blew it off. I have spent all week solving this mystery and here is how it plays out:


• Our dishwasher is not all the way installed. It is in the cabinet, but my ex step dad never finished it, so the line runs down to the crawl space, but is not hooked up.


• Our heat ducts run though the crawl space.


• Two days after the first scratching sound, which came from below/behind the dishwasher, Iee (yes, i,e,e) alerted me to the heat register near the bottom of my computer desk. I turned off the fan for the laptop and listened. I had the sound of nails on metal. NAILS ON METAL PEOPLE!


• I had no options. But I do own a very nice electrolux. So, I shoved that hose down there (now i realize just how gross this could have been) and tried to suck that f-er up. He escaped. And I had to fight Iee, you see, she wanted to crawl down in there and catch that f-er.


• Think I will name him F-er.


• We live in an area where you get mice. Fields. Just 100 yards away. When we moved in, the house had sat empty and weater proofed for 2 months or more. We found some rat poison in the bay window, but have never seen a mouse. We assumed this was because we have kitties. We assumed the mice could smell our cats (and the ones in the neighborhood that prowl around) and said "HELL NO!" to our house. Come to think of it, we had a snake come onto our porch a few weeks ago. I bet he was HUNTING A MOUSE! Do snakes hunt? like how far will they go to pursue their prey? Should've kept the SNAKE!


• I like snakes more than mice. He was just a little garden snake. I wouldn't have been too upset to know he was in my crawl space. I miss that snake. (At the time I screamed (he slithered over my toes!) and made frantic motions for George (who grew up in Kentucky and was taught to assume all snakes are poisonous, therefore you don't touch them even if they just slithered over your wife's feet) to grab it and throw it into the street)


• Where were we before the snake bullet?


• Yeah, never had a mouse.


• So, then while I am cooking, I hear this f-er again. This time I bring back up. Or my back up showed up on their own. Two kitties. One black and white, and one big fat all white guy who once tortured a hampster. (I rescued the hampster and returned him to safety, but Boo insists he could have done Buttercup in)


• Cut to me, on my hands and knees, 29 weeks pregnant, looking under my dishwasher and oven, whith these 2 cats. Booty in the air. Oh, and I am naked.


• The oven and the dishwasher are flat on the ground, aka hardwoods. So, I got brave and opened the dishwasher. Empty. I then move the stove, and we still hear the movement. I inspect. There is no way for this mouse to get out from under the dishwasher, if he is under. He'd have to eat my dishwasher, or about a solid foot of hardwood. If he were behind, which I saw no evidence of, he could come out and play all the time, but he doesn't. Trust me, these kitties have been waiting. They spent 3 hours watching the dishwasher. Then when they left, the pitbull/boxer, Moose, stepped in for guard duty.


• So, this guy can get from one end of my house, dishwasher, all the way to the heat duct. Does this mean we have a mouse who ate into our heat duct and we will be wasting energy heating our crawl space? (Which I wouldn't mind if it made the kitchen floor slightly warmer in the winter) And he could use the heat ducts to get anywhere in our house? I really want to check this out (in the crawl space) but the crawl space gets too thin for a super thin man to fit into about halfway between dishwasher and the heat register at my feet. Plus, I am huge and a little afraid of crawl spaces in general, especially knowing that a mouse is down there.


• How would I get rid of this thing? I usually don't support killing. But especially now since I would have to smell the dead mouse! And let's remember, if i poisoned that f-er, I would worry about my cats eating the f-er and dying. I like these good mouse hunters.


• A trap. I don't want to hurt him, plus, where would I put it? And I don't want to listen to him screech all night if I caught him while George was at work.


• I am screwed until he manages to eat his way into my house. Unless YOU have some great tips? No extra money to hire some private mouse hunter either.


• I had other things to post, but I seriously just wrote an entire post on this F-er. I'm done.


• Moose is snoring. So cute.

Check out Danifred and her mouse-less house.