MOUSE UPDATE

I had the landlord seal up the suspected point of entry, a hole behind the stove where the gas line comes in, and haven't seen any mice or evidence thereof in a week.

HOORAY!

Build a Better Mouse Trap...

I'm not as gay as I used to be. Dancing shirtless into the wee hours of the night is not a regular part of my life anymore. I haven't donned a costume for Halloween, one of the gay high holidays, in years. But I still scream like a girl when I see a mouse.

My reaction is way more than just a knee-jerk, "eeek!" Having a mouse in my house brings me lots of negative feelings. It makes me feel poor. It makes me feel dirty (not in a good way.) And worst of all, it makes me feel like I have lost control of my home.

I am a human. It is a mouse. It should not be able to enter my domain. It should not be able to take a nightly poo on my kitchen counter. I am an advanced being with vast technology on my side. Who does this mouse think he is?

Old-fashioned mouse traps, the wooden kind with a heavy spring hinge and metal bar, have always scared me. Almost as much as mice. The mechanism is so precariously held in place. It takes a steady hand to set one of those things, and my hand's about as steady as Michael J. Fox's.

So when Jess and I decided to take action against our rodent, we sought alternative traps. First we tried glue traps. Then we tried poison. We tried those new-fangled, easy-set traps--the ones that are plastic and resemble the clips that you use to fasten potato chip bags closed. None of these worked.

So, in desperation, we have resorted to the old-fashioned, wooden, finger-destroying traps of yesteryear. These traps have been modernized in a very small way. The little platform where you used to put the bait has been replaced with a bright yellow piece of plastic meant to look like Swiss cheese. The packaging says the traps "never need baiting." Whereas Jess never reads the instructions to anything he purchases, I always do. (Even for our friggin' toaster oven! How sick is that?) So I insisted we set the traps without bait. We've done that for several nights, and it has not worked.

Last night, I was in bed and asleep long before Jess. I was too sleepy to wonder what was keeping Jess up. He finally came to bed, and woke me up long enough to have a conversation about whether there are rats this far from the city, and whether they could get into our apartment. Nice! Thanks for waking me up for that!

So, I wake up this morning, insanely early, and stumble into the kitchen. On the counter I see that Jess has repositioned and set the wooden trap. I see that Jess has put a small dollop of peanut butter on the faux cheese. And right next to the trap, which has not been tripped, I see a small mouse turd brazenly placed no more than an inch away from the baited trap.

I can't help but wonder which of us, the human or the mouse, is the advanced being?