A Mousy Tidbit of A Story

2-16-09 Recently, Emily received a box that included a package of mousetraps. At this, our entire group of apartments rejoiced. You see, we have mice--and not the kind that you coo at while they blink at you while sitting contently in an aquarium. No, these mice are bold mice who steal bait from traps and scamper across the floor almost whenever they want, the type of mice who scatter like cockroaches do when a light is flipped.

Two Saturday nights ago, Emily and I were staying up late, talking, when Emily thought she saw something move into Lorraine and Megan's bedroom, where they were sleeping. We thought it was nothing, until the something ran into OUR room. It was a big skinny gray mouse, and it immediately darted into our closet. Emily jumped up, stuck her feet on the desk in our room, and climbed up onto her top-bunk bed. I dashed out to the kitchen and grabbed the dustpan and tiny broom. I went and tried to drive it out of the closet--but I found it on my suitcase and jumped backward. It skittered across the floor and hid behind our dresser. I tried to scared it out and it tried to hide in the gap between my bed and the wall. I scared it out again and it ran back into the closet. I scared it back under the dresser, then erected barricades and Emily and I turned off the light and went to bed. The next morning, we were sitting in our front room when it dashed out of our room, ran around the edge of the room and dove into the hole that it has in the wall.

Then Emily got the mousetraps. We eagerly set them up last Sunday night, and thought that the mice would just steal the bait once again. Unfortunately (and fortunately) we were wrong. We had all just gotten into bed when we heard a loud SNAP and frantic squeals. We had caught one! The four of us were sad that it had to die, but glad that it would not being running around our house and leaving droppings on the counter beneath our drying rack. We would rather have clean-ish dishes than one live mouse.

More later.