Mouse of the House Part 1

Well one of my New Years resolutions was to update my blog on a weekly basis. And as you can see I am failing miserably. But fear not my three loyal readers, for I am going to try really hard to update this puppy every Friday. This will give you something to look forward to during your long boring week; I'm so thoughtful.

So the title might have you thinking I'm going to write something about Disney. Perhaps something interesting about the Disney Pixar merger. Nope. This is about a real mouse and the hell it put me through.

Turn the way back machine to late last summer. I am at work doing that animating thing I sometimes do, when my wife calls to inform me the sugar in our pantry has been gnawed. Of course my first thought was gremlins, but then I remembered they weren't real. Also in the pantry was an array of little bits of poo. Lovely a mouse is in the house.

That evening I come home, inspect the crime scene and dust for prints. Nothing. The little bastard was wearing gloves. So now it was time to play that fun game "How the hell did it get in here". And after going over the rules and picking team names we set out through the house looking for entry points.

No signs of gnawing on wood or furniture...nothing...except A LOT of mouse poop. Yes the more we looked the more we found, all around the baseboards of the house. I was so mad I nearly asploded.

Step #1 clean up all the poo.

Lysol became my new best friend as I went throw the house spraying and wiping...and cursing, while my wife kept Wonder Pea out of the way. It took a lot of time and A LOT of Lysol but finally the poo was cleaned up. Then I made a critical mistake. I turned to the internet to find out about what kind of mouse we may be dealing with.

The internet, usually a trusted friend, returned all kinds of nightmare scenarios of how certain mice/rats that are common in our region can have poo that will kill you: A. if you don't clean it up properly ie no sweeping B. you say the F word while cleaning it up. I wasn't entirely sure that I followed the 10 step program to cleaning up mouse poo(i did sweep a couple times) and I was sure that I said the F word at least 500 times while cleaning up.

I was certain that we were all going to die.

After having several heart attacks my wife took the internet away and put it up on a high shelf where I could not reach it. This only helped a little since my "good" imagination was working overtime. My wife pointed out that I was probably more likely to now die from the gallons of Lysol I sprayed and inhauled, than any mouse poo. That almost, kind of, didn't really make me feel better. Plus, eventhough we cleaned up everything, the house still felt tainted by the mouse. I told a coworker that I just felt like burning the place down and rebuilding.

But now it was time to focus on Step #2 catching the mouse

Next time: The importance of following directions....