The Great Mouse Hunt...

My sister is in Ghana with me now and will remain here until I return Stateside in August. It is nice to have her here. I love my sister dearly. With that said, she is still my sister and from time to time I wonder if we really are related

The two of us do not live alone here in my house. We have a third roommate that eats much of the food and defecates everywhere; we have a mouse, or rather, had, a mouse. For the past number of weeks I have known that there was a mouse living under the stove in the kitchen. If I would leave anything edible on the counter, even though it be sealed, I would find little nibblings on it in the morning. One night, in the middle of the night, I walked into the kitchen to get a drink of water and as I walked into the kitchen and turned on the light, I felt something soft under my foot and realized that I had just stepped on the mouse. I am not sure who was more startled at this point, but I lifted my foot to see the mouse, disoriented, run in circles around the kitchen. I was able to re-focus my wits enough to grab whatever was handy and throw it at the mouse; the nearest thing being silverware. After a few seconds of hurricane-like commotion; me yelling at and throwing spoons, forks, and butter knives at a rodent that is no bigger than my ring finger, the mouse disappeared under the stove and I was not inclined to try to move the stove to continue the confrontation.

After the incident, I went out and bought two mouse traps. I brought them home, set them, put food on them and went to bed with a smile on my face. However, in the morning when I checked, I found the food gone, but not mouse. The same story played out for the next week or so. I just continued to feed the mouse. At one point I learned that the mouse was probably too light to spring the trap. I attempted to set the trap so that even a feather would spring it. After having the trap snap on my own hand in the process, I moved on to plan B.

With all my expert knowledge in engineering, I thought it best to put a larger piece of food on the trap so that when the mouse got on, the weight of the rodent and the big piece of food would set the trapoff. Again, the next morning, no mouse and no food. Me feeding the mouse each night went on for another week before I realized the traps would only accomplish creating a 400 pound mouse. I claimed defeat and hoped that the mouse would stay in the kitchen.

Not the case. The mouse began to scurry almost everywhere throughout the house. One night, as my sister and I sat in the living room, we saw the mouse scurry onto the bottom shelve of a bookcase. He thought he was hiding out of sight, but we could still see his tail. The two of us went into attack mode and took the flip-flops off of our feet and put them on our hands. I hit the book that he was behind and he ran out of the book case and under a chair next to my sister.

At this point I should tell you that neither myself nor my sister are, ever have been, or have any interest in becoming, hunters. Assuming this mouse presented himself to us on a silver platter, we probably would not really know what to do with it. My sister knew that the mouse was under the chair and decided, on the spot that the best plan of action would be to flush him out towards me. As she bent down and put her face next to the floor to look under the chair, the mouse, instead of being flushed out towards me, galloped directly at her. My sister, being almost as cool under pressure as I was in the kitchen when I threw silverware at it, reacted by screaming, throwing both flip-flops off of her hands and jumping up in the air. Once again the mouse had out muscled, maneuvered, and simply, out-smarted us.

However, it was our luck that the mouse ran into a closet that was near an exterior door. We quickly devised a plan of action and built a coral out of whatever we could find from the entrance of the closet to the exterior door. When we were both armed with a broom or mop and had both built up enough confidence, we did all that we could to get the mouse to come out of the closet. When he did, he ran around in circles looking for an escape route, we both yelled, and brandished out weapons at him, and in only a few seconds, the mouse ran outside. Our hunting skills honed, we quickly shut the door and our great mouse hunt was successfully ended.