Days of Wine and Rodents

Everything started about a week ago, when our two cats, Pickett and Melly, began to spend hours upon hours staring at the corner cabinet in our kitchen housing our lazy susan. That's where we store all our baking supplies - flour, extra sugar, sifters, etc. "It must be a mouse," Katrina opined, after observing the third day of our feline security detail.
"Ridiculous!" I told her. We live in a new house (well, four years old, going on five this April), but far too new to be hosting rodents. And, certainly not mice.
Now, my experience with mice the past 35 years has been limited to Tom and Jerry cartoons and the one mouse incident at the house I grew up in in Seal Beach. In that incident, someone (my mom, most likely) espied a little critter on our back porch, and dispatched my dad over to Dooley's Hardware to pick up a mousetrap. I can just barely remember this event, which would most likely place it in about my fourth year. Which means, apart from the occasional friend who owned one as a pet (and a fixation with "Pinky and the Brain" about ten or twelve years ago), mice never really entered my life.
While I was at work on Monday, I got a frantic phone call from Katrina. "PICKETT CAUGHT A MOUSE!" she practically screamed at me. She had the evidence waiting for me, hermetically sealed in a ziploc bag like some evidence on "C.S.I.", when I got home. Sure enough, it was a mouse, all right. Just a little thing - I kind of felt sorry for it.
That night, Katrina informed me, "The cats say there's another mouse in the kitchen. They think it's under the island."
My response was to say I'd pick up some traps at Fred Meyer the next day.

Turns out I didn't really need to.

9:30 RRRRRING!!!
This is Mr. Rainey.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! PICKETT CAUGHT ANOTHER MOUSE!!!!
Really? What happ-
HE CAUGHT IT, AND WHEN I TRIED TO TRAP IT UNDER A BOWL, I THINK I BROKE ITS LITTLE BACK!!
Um...wow. Where is it now?
I HAVE IT TRAPPED IN A TUPPERWARE BOWL WITH A FRISBEE HOLDING IT IN. I CAN SEE HIM DOING A LITTLE COMMANDO CRAWL IN THERE WITH HIS FRONT LEGS!!! AHHHHHHHHH!!!
Well...take him out to the field, and let him go.
OKAY, I WILL!!!

(She'll deny it, but she really did speak at a heightened volume throughout the conversation. Wow, another mouse. Pretty wild.

10:35 RRRRRING!!!
This is Mr. Rainey.
AHHHHHHHHHH!!! ANOTHER MOUSE!!!!
Pickett caught another mouse?
NO, PICKETT DIDN'T CATCH ANOTHER MOUSE! MELLY DID!
(For those not in the know, Melly is our fat, codependent cat who has a really poor sense of boundaries and interpersonal space. We got her for company for Pickett, who was lonely when my other cat, Lois, wouldn't play with him. Until today, Melly had been as close as we come to what some term "self-locomotive furniture" - a cat who's taken care of, but not terribly cared for, if you know what I mean. Her whole status changed with that mouse).

It turns out Melly's quite the mouser. She actually has classic mouser qualities - big ears and eyes. Her name is at one turn a play on "Smelly Cat" from "Friends," but was also a legitimate shortening of "Amelia," for Amelia Earhart, who she reminded us of with her big ears, that sort of reminded us of an old-time aviator's helmet.

Anyway, those big ears and eyes came in handy on Tuesday, as she landed her first mouse. It was alive, so Katrina managed to get it away from her and plunk it into the same Tupperware bowl and take it over to the field. (The field is actually outside our neighborhood, thereby greatly reducing the chances that any of these little furballs could find their way back). It was in this same field that she had deposited the broken-backed Gimp Mouse, who, according to her, scurried away as fast as his front two paws would move his immobilized backside. (I'm thinking his name probably changed to something like "Hawkfood" yesterday afternoon, but one can never be sure).

So, at this point (not quite 11 AM on Tuesday), the count was Pickett, 2, Melly, 1. Not for long, though.

11:30 RRRRRING!!!
This is Mr. Rainey.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! MELLY CAUGHT ANOTHER MOUSE!!!!!

And we're tied up, two all.

Now, all this mousing around really began to get on Katrina's nerves. It really began to show when I got home from work yesterday. We were both standing in the kitchen, and Pickett walked by, carrying a rainbow-colored cloth mouse in his mouth. Seeming to know that his mom was jittery, Pickett mischievously dropped it, right on Kat's foot.

I kid you not, the woman nearly jumped clear up on the island in the kitchen.

I, for one, found this all quite funny.

Funny, that is, until I found out something about mice.

True, they're cute little things, with twitchy little noses and darling little pink ears.

But, there's something else about them.


THEY CHEW THROUGH STUFF.

Like the spot under our kitchen island, where the conduit line comes up from the subfloor to the electrical outlet. Where there was once a neat hole just big enough for a conduit to get through, it's now big enough for a conduit and a mouse.

There's something else about mice.


The little %&^$$s are smart.

I mentioned how I'd bought some mousetraps at Fred Meyer's, right? I baited four traps with peanut butter, and placed one under the fireplace (the cats had been growling there at one point), one behind the dishwasher, one behind the stove, and the last one under the access hatch to the crawlspace under our house (through a creepy pull-up door in the floor of our hall closet). I set them all last night, expecting to hear at least one satisfying SNAP! sometime in the night.

When I got up this morning, all of the traps were unmolested. Okay, I thought. Give the little buggers a few more hours. Nothing alive can resist the temptation of peanut butter, and when they come for it, SNAP!!

Well, I was half right, anyway. It's true, nothing alive can resist the temptation of peanut butter.

The mice in my house really like peanut butter.

They like it so much, in fact, that they ATE THE PEANUT BUTTER RIGHT OFF THE TRAPS. Not a single one was tripped.

Undaunted, I reset the kitchen traps, this time with peanut butter and a small sliver of Tillamook cheddar cheese. There's a little hook-type thing on the spot where you place the bait, and I made sure to squish the cheese into it really tightly, thus insuring the trap would be sprung the next time a mouse came a-callin'.

No such luck.

I just checked the traps an hour ago - the cheese (and peanut butter glue) was completely gone.

So.

We have mice.

Not just mice, but smart mice.

Do us a favor, and don't tell our social worker, okay?