EEEK! A Mouse is in the House (Or the garage)

This morning, my husband Mike went into the garage to get the dog food. He was unusually silent and I poked my head in to see what was going on. Mike beckoned me over and we stood looking at the garage shelves where something alive was obviously moving around inside a plastic bag! It was doing quite a lot of moving in a very cartoon like fashion. Being the highly intelligent people that we are, we deduced it was a mouse. Later that morning, I was getting in the car to take the kids to school and saw the super mouse jump down to a lower shelf!

Yes, I added poison mouse to my to-do-list today. Killing is not a common agenda for my day but neither is having to battle living creatures to get to my stuff.

For mice (sadly this is not our first, visitor) we opt for D-con poison. You put the little box out, away from the kids and dog and soon thereafter the box has moved a few inches so that you know it has been accessed. Then the mice mysteriously disappear. I know people say that they go in the walls and smell, but we have never had that happen. They simply run away to look for water and we clean up the torn bits of paper and droppings that are the only evidence of our former roommates.

Why don't I use traps? A disturbing incident as a child has kept me away from them, (and no human limbs were not involved.) We had an infestation of mice in my childhood home. We caught many in traps, until the day Gordo the Great came to live with us. There was a trap in the room next to mine. One night it went off and woke me up. I was terrified. Even more so, when I heard something in the hallway and then something banging against the side of the bathtub making an erie SOS signal. I finally called my mom. She told me to go back to bed and that I was exaggerating (ME!???) The next morning, the trap was sprung but no Gordo. That was when mom finally believed me and we knew we had more than an average mouse. Several more traps were sprung and no Gordo. Then he did the worst thing possible! He destroyed the popcorn container I made for my parents at Girl Scouts, eating the shellacked corn and worst of all stealing the mini-salt shaker I had glued to the top. How could he? Mom invested in larger rat traps (and no, we did not live in the ghetto but in the lovely foothills of Burbank, California.) Gordo avoided the rat traps. He knew better. Finally we resorted to poison, never to hear from Gordo again.

And that is why I am a poison girl. Goodbye Gordo.