Mickey has left the building

A week or two ago, we discovered that we have a mouse. Or mice, as it were. Though we did not have visual evidence of the actual creature(s) in question, we were finding plenty of droppings in our kitchen and living room to prove that if they weren't living in our house, they were at least using it as a dumping ground.

I have a co-worker with the same problem, and he tipped me off to what looked like an ingenious creation on the Internet. This is only one example, I wish I could find the exact one I used because it had funny drawings. Anyway, I set up a trap in our kitchen and our living room, complete with "ramp" and bucket o' death, but to no avail. At this point, I realized that I was dealing with a smart mouse, a la Jerry.

Kevin hit the home improvement store and returned with poison packets that the mouse will have to gnaw through, ingest the poison and die at a later point. Kevin pointed out the beauty in this method, as we would not have to clean up the mouse carcass if it died outside our house. I pointed out the flaw, in that it would probably end up dying in our house anyway, at which point we would never know until we detected an odiferous scent at a later point in time. This always ends up on an awful search for the carcass, with fingers crossed that it's not in a wall or some other unreachable place.

After finding a singular pretentious dropping squarely in the middle of a couch cushion yesterday, the gauntlet had been thrown. I went to Home Depot and after reviewing the options in the Rodent and Varmint section, I decided on the standard Victor mousetraps. Since I grew up in a farm area, we had a mouse in our house once or twice. These were the traps my parents used, baited with peanut butter and set inside a paper bag for easy disposal. Since they're so cheap, you can afford to ditch the whole trap along with the catch.

After spending many minutes trying to set the sensitive traps, resulting in flying peanut butter and snagged fingernails, I finally got three of the four set - two in the kitchen, one in the living room where we were seeing the droppings. I placed them along the walls, since the package indicated that is where mice like to run, along the baseboard. While we were settling into bed last night, Kevin said, "I don't want to hear you screaming in the morning if there's one down there."

So this morning I went downstairs and checked - our first trap had a mouse! It was curled up like it was asleep next to the trap; I didn't explore close enough to see what got caught in the trap. I also didn't touch it, for fear that it was asleep and would run away. I calmly went back upstairs and told Kevin there was a mouse in our trap. He emptied it before he left for work and called me to say that "Mickey has left the building."

But you know what one mouse generally means...a mouse family. Better set those traps in the basement too.

Edited to add that we caught another one on 9/26. I'm hoping that's the last of them, but we'll see!