Mighty Mouse?

It's been almost two months since I had seen a mouse (or signs of mice) around the house. Foolishly, I had believed (hoped) that the mice had retreated back to the great outdoors.


Which is why I was completely surprised this evening when I was standing at the sink washing dishes and turned my head - just in time to see a mouse dart out from the dirty pans I had stacked on the stove top, dive to the floor and run behind the fridge.


I swear I saw its little paws extended forward as it took the plunge to the ground.


I screamed so loudly that it hurt my diaphragm.


Needless to say, the traps have been prepped once again with fresh peanut butter and new glue traps have been set out.

Mouse Repelling Noise Machine

To address the concerns that spongeamy (aka my lovely sister) has expressed, I thought my readers would be interested in seeing the mouse repelling noise machine (my description) that Andrew and I picked up at Lowe's last weekend, the Victor Sonic Pestchaser. I'll let the website explain the technology behind using sound waves to repel mice.

It emits an audible hum. Andrew and I were surprised at first, thinking that it would be completely silent, as the package describes. However, it's pretty low-pitched so it's not loud enough to be annoying.

The jury is still out on how well this works - I've read both positive and negative reviews online and heard mostly good stories from people who have used in the past. I just know I had to try something different to make sure the mice were staying away.

Mouse Update

I woke up this morning feeling extremely guilty still about the mouse and the glue trap. When I went downstairs to the kitchen, the first thing I noticed was that a cupboard door was open. This was the same cupboard door that I had closed on the mouse last night. I looked in and the glue trap and the mouse were gone! Looking around the kitchen, I finally noticed the glue trap upside down and partially under one of my shoes - this was around eight feet away from the cupboard. Andrew thinks he was moving around a lot, trying to get off the trap and ended up on the floor and using the shoe as leverage. Based on how much it was moving last night, I just don't get how the mouse could've moved the trap that much when it was so exhausted last night. I keep thinking some of it's friends must've helped it out.

So now I'm conflicted. I'm disgusted by the fact that I still have one less dead mouse in the house. But I also don't think I can go through using glue traps again. Andrew is going to reset the standard spring trap and bait it again and he's got a new location he wants to try it with. But if we still can't catch anything, I may have to compromise and use the glue traps only if we figure out some way to humanely kill (what an oxymoron) the mouse right away.

Joyce 1, Mouse 0

I just enjoyed a slice of my cobbler with some light whipped cream - delicious.



I'll have my cobbler and eat it too, mice be damned. I'm taking great satisfaction in knowing that I got to taste it and the mice didn't.

Stuart Little Must Die

Sunday started off as a pretty typical day. Before Andrew and I headed to the gym, I spent time washing the dishes and whipping up a batch of Peach and Nectarine Cobbler. I left it cooling on the stove and we left for the gym.

When we got home, Andrew headed upstairs to shower while I went to the sink to wash my hands so I could start preparing dinner. The last thing I was thinking about was mice, since we hadn't see any sign of them since last weekend. I was hoping we had caught the only two mice in the house.

Then I looked over to my left, saw a mouse head peering out of a stove top burner and yelled my head off. Andrew came racing down the stairs to figure out what was wrong and it was pretty obvious since the damned mouse kept poking its head out and looking at us. We ended up lifting the stove top and this is the sight that met our eyes:

Can you see the mouse?

Here's a closer look at it:

Ok, I'll say it. The thing was ridiculously cute with its large glistening eyes. But it was also running all over the interior of my stove. Andrew and I tried to trap it in an empty cardboard container but it ended up leaping out of the stove, across the sink, across my dishpan, ran around my drying dishes, ran back into the dishpan and leaped off the counter onto the floor, heading back into my kitchen walls through a crack in the counter next to the dishwasher.

The damn thing ruined an entire afternoon's worth of work. Although the first batch of cobbler looked untouched, Andrew rightfully convinced me to throw it out. It was just so painful to do since it looked great. It's one thing to throw away something you've ruined by burning or something that tastes gross. It's another thing to dump a dessert that looks absolutely perfect! We also wiped down the counters with disinfectant spray and washed ALL the dishes over again. And the dishpan.

As we head to bed tonight, Andrew's put out two more traps. He's hoping for a trifecta tomorrow morning - mice in all three traps. The mice are cute but they're getting bold and running wild. I'm sorry Stuart Little, Mattimeo and all the other cute fictional mice I used to read about. It's time for you to leave my house peacefully or die. I've hit my limit.

Vermin Infestation - Yuck!

"And all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse"...

BECAUSE THEY WERE ALL DEAD AND STUCK IN MOUSE TRAPS.

It's official, I've got mice in the house. And I'm feeling a little bloodthirsty about it.

I was washing the dishes today and I pulled open a seldom-used drawer that is next to the sink to search for a magic eraser sponge.

This is what met my eyes:



The little bastards chewed their way through:

• The insulation that surrounds the dishwasher on the other side of the sink and dragged pieces of it into the drawer
• A plastic Target bag
• Both my waxed fabric and paper icing bags
• A wax birthday candle
• Paper

And left tons of little pellets (any black pellets you see on your screen).

In case you can't see them, here's a shot of the next drawer over and the mess they left on a napkin.

Unlike a horribly embarrassing incident two years ago while Camie was visiting where I thought I had rats in the basement (it ended up being a squirrel and I killed that sucker with a combination of peanut butter/M&M's/rat poison), it's really mice this time. And I feel slightly vindicated.

Last month, the night before I left for Japan, I had been working late each day on little sleep, to make sure I could leave work for two weeks without a guilty conscience. When I got home that night, I still hadn't packed but had to put in another two hours of working time.

So needless to say, I was feeling a bit delirious around midnight when I realized I needed to go to bed and wake up at 4 am to finish packing. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a brown blur race across the kitchen floor. I screamed loudly enough for Andrew to hear from upstairs and he came rushing down. I told him what I thought I saw, he inspected the cabinets where I thought I saw the brown blur go and then he calmed me down enough to go to bed. And I promptly forgot about the incident because I didn't see any other signs of visitors or any more brown blurs.

As I was telling Andrew about the mice tonight, I told him to admit it, he thought I had been hallucinating that night when I told him about the brown blur. He admitted it readily but pointed out that I told him that it was a bird that had hopped across the floor. In my defense, I was tired, it was a brown blur and I thought it moved too quickly to be a mouse.

But the most important thing you need to take away from this story is that I was right about seeing something move across the kitchen floor. And now I need to find a way to annihilate it and all its friends. Before they find the lazy Susan filled with all my snacks and baking supplies.