a mouse in the house

I'm not a girly girl. I'm a do it myself kind of person. If something needs doing, I roll up my sleeves and get to it. However, in one way I fit that stereotypical portrait of "girl." I scream in pure unadulterated terror over small creepy crawly things like spiders and mice. I seem to have had more than my share of run ins with rodents over the years. I grew up in an old house. One prone to mice, bats and once, for a few memorable weeks, rats. It was not uncommon for one of us to realize the thing fluttering around the ceiling was not a bird who'd lost it's way but a bat looking for hair to nest in. Cue the screaming and hysterical flapping of arms and running in circles.

The whole rat incident though left me with emotional scars. My parents ended up placing poison in the attic for the rats to nosh on which did finally do them in but they did not go quietly into that good night. Let me back up a bit to say, my bedroom ceiling had a great big hole in it. The five boys lived on the third floor of the house and their bathroom was directly above my room. A pipe leaked and my Dad pulled apart the ceiling to find the cause and just never seemed to get around to patching it back up. So I lived with a hole in my ceiling. Not a big deal. Until that one afternoon, when I was holed up in my room, on my bed with the door closed to read a book. Imagine my horror when I hear a noise coming from that aforementioned hole in the ceiling, and upon looking up, see a rat...a RAT!!!...fall out of the hole and thump onto my bedroom floor. It is twitching and squeaking and, worst of all, is between me and the door. Commence horror stricken screaming. Now one would think someone would come to investigate what was causing me to scream. A house full of people and no one, not a one, came to save me from what sounded like murderizing. I finally scraped enough courage to tiptoe around the dying rat and out the door. I ran downstairs and hollered at all my brothers and sisters for ignoring my screams. They just laughed. Stupid jerks. No, not really. I forgave them all...but that doesn't mean I will ever let them forget it.

Then there was the time our apartment in the city acquired a family of mice. My little calico cat was a champion mouser so I was confident she would take care of things. One night I woke up to hear her chasing something around the bedroom and I was sure I would find a little carcass in the morning. However, it seemed her victim managed to get away because their was no little gift from the cat outside my bedroom door the next morning. I rushed around getting ready for work and forgot all about the cat's late night rambles. I grabbed my bag up off the bedroom floor and place it on the bed so I could reach inside to get my gloves out of the back pocket. I felt something skitter on my hand and then up my arm. It took only a second before I realized the mouse had taken refuge from the cat in my bag and it had just RUN UP MY EFFING SLEEVE! I completely lost it...waving my arms around like a maniac and screaming loud enough to wake the dead. God only knows what happened to the mouse. It must have flown out of my sleeve during my hysterics and hightailed it to the safety of the city streets. I still shudder inside to even think of the incident.

I think the stupid rodents are all out to get me. How many run ins can one person have with the damn creatures? Recently I had yet another rodent face off. There is plenty of wilderness around me so there is no reason at all for them to become tenants in my full enough as it is house. Every year though the mice decide to give it a try. Because a cat, or two, or three, have always been part of the family, the mice don't usually stay long. This year, I think because of the construction of the addition, we have had a worse than usual time evicting our rodent residents. The tip of the iceberg, however, came one morning as I got ready to feed the dogs. We have this handy dandy special bin for the dog food that has a lid you flip open to prevent any animals getting into the dog food. (Ahhh, the irony). I usually just flip the lid up, reach in and grope around for the scooper and start scooping food into the bowls. All without really opening my eyes. It's before six a.m. after all. That fateful morning, I reached in and began feeling around as the food slipped and slid over my hand. Then all hell broke loose as my morning fog started to lift and I realized that it was not food moving over my hand but a MOUSE! I began screaming, threw the metal dog bowls (why? I have no idea) and ran to the sink to wash the hell out of my hands. The poor dogs actually crept back into their crate they were so frightened by my behaviour. I stood in front of the cabinet trying to decide what I should do. What if I opened the lid and it jumped out at me? How was I going to get it out of there? Could I call my husband home from work for this? In the end I put on my big girl panties and dragged the whole bin outside and dumped it. Nitwit that I am, I screamed when I lifted the lid off and jumped back about six feet to make sure Mickey didn't come anywhere near me. I watched it scurry away and then swept all the dog food into the trash.


Enough lazing about Sir Benjamin, time to start earning your keep because I am done with rodent shenanigans.