Throwback Thursday: If You Give a Mouse a Sticky Trap....
Y'all, I have GOT to share this post with you. It's not super deep or anything, but it is one of the more hilarious mornings of my life. For two years after college I lived in the sweetest house on West King street and we made too many memories there to share here, but this saga is worth sharing. Jill and I were the only ones in the house over Christmas break in December of 2011 when we were over taken by mice....
Part 1:
I woke up last week and went about my normal morning routine, made some coffee and began to make some oatmeal.
Went to get a spoon from the silverware drawer and open it to find basically hundreds of mouse droppings.
Sick, I know.
I then scour the kitchen to see if the little guy has left us presents elsewhere.
He has.
In the drawer under the stove and in the space under the sink.
Fantastic. We have our first mouse.
So I call Scott, my boss and landlord, he says don't set up a trap with food because that really will lure more in.
"Free food!" think the mice, and meander into our house.
So I have my mom bring us some sticky traps that my grandmother had at her house.
We set up the traps where we found the droppings and then we wait.
Part 2:
Saturday morning, I wake up, make my coffee, eat an egg white omelet, and settle down in the living room to watch some TV.
But then I hear it. A funny noise coming from the kitchen.
I tell myself it's the coffee pot for awhile, then I realize that the coffee stopped brewing a long time ago.
So I turn the TV off and go stand quietly in the kitchen.
Yep.
He's caught.
The weird noise is coming from under the sink.
An odd scraping sound.
(I need to say that until this moment I had not been afraid of the mouse in the slightest. I knew he wasn't going to attack me in my sleep or anything like that, but something about knowing he was there, under my sink, stuck in the trap, trying to claw his way lose, made my skin crawl.)
At this point I realize I can't do this on my own so I wake my roommate Jill up and make her listen to the mouse.
We tried calling Scott but he doesn't answer.
So we call Ben, Jill's cousin who lives on our street, but he doesn't answer either.
In their defense, it was before 8am on a Saturday morning during Christmas break.
We quickly realize we have to get the mouse out on our own.
So we prepare.
Part 3:
I blocked off the doorways leading out of the kitchen with various pieces of furniture in case he made a break for it.
We put boots on over our PJ's and put oven mits on in case he got violent and started biting.
Then, we opened the cabinet.
And he was there, but not really inside the trap. His tail was still stuck to it but he had obviously worked his way out of it somewhat because there was a CHUNK OF HAIR/SKIN sticking to the bottom inside. Yuck.
So Jill arms herself with a pair of salad tongs and I grab a giant pot with a lid.
After taking a moment to muster up enough courage to pull the little guy out, Jill grabs the trap with the tongs and begins to drag it towards us.
This is when things get funny.
The mouse is still only stuck to the trap by his bottom half, so the rest of his body is outside of the trap and his front legs are outstretched trying to hold on to whatever he can grab.
Then as she gets him to the edge, about to fall into the pot, he clings on for dear life.
Jill likes to compare it to the scene in The Lion King when Mufasa is about to meet his doom.
So she throws it in the pot, I slam the lid on, and we just look at it for a second.
Then we hear him move which startles us and brings us back into action.
So I grab the pot and take of running towards the front door.
Thankfully this all went down at about 8:15 in the morning so I'm pretty sure no neighbors saw me run outside in rainboots and sweat pants, with hot pot holders on my hands, to dump a mouse in the trash can.
I sprinted to the trash can, emptied the pot, and sprinted back inside, collapsing on a chair.
Jill and I were feeling pretty proud of ourselves!
We weren't really sure how things were going to turn out for the mouse at this point because he was still very much alive, just waiting on death, in our trashcan on the street.
Part 4:
Scott shows up.
We tell him that we have things under control and that we did it ourselves.
So the three of us go look in the trash can.
And the little mouse is just chillin in there.
Looking up at us.
(Until this moment, Jill had not had an ounce of empathy for this mouse. She was terrified of it and wanted it dead. But when she saw him so scared and lonely she began to feel sorry for him).
Just so happens that there is a cat rolling around in the driveway next door.
Scott calls it over and it starts rubbing up on our legs.
Then Scott reached into the trash can, retrieved the mouse, and set it on the ground.
Jill at this point is standing on the back of Scott's car. Not on the ground. To keep away from the dangerous mouse.
So we're thinking that the cat is going to devour this little thing right in front of us.
But no, this cat is insane.
Pretty sure he was under some kind of heavy dosage of cat nip because he just kinda sniffed at the mouse then rolled around in the middle of the street.
What kind of cat doesn't eat a mouse?
I guess that I'm glad we didn't see that go down. Yikes.
Now, we're just kind of ready to put the mouse out of his misery, so Scott takes a seal-able bag out of his car and squeezes most of the air out of it.
Then he picks up the mouse and the trap and tries to pull the mouse off of it.
He succeeds in pulling the mouse apart from his tail.
Yeh.....
Things are getting ugly.
The mouse went into the bag, Scott sealed it up, put in inside a trash bag, then put it all back in the trashcan.
And that whole ordeal ended.
Part 5:
I found more mouse droppings this morning.
So good news, there was more than one mouse.
But this time, I'm ready to take him on!
PS: anything that the mice may possibly have touched has been washed multiple times now. also, Jill and I deep cleaned the whole house after we got rid of the mouse. not gonna put up with this ish.
I would like to add now, 5 years later, that this wasn't the worst mice experience we had during that month. When our roommate who lived in the basement apartment came home, she found three drowned mice in her toilet!!! Talk about a weird experience! By the time it was all over, I think we ended up killing 8-10 mice in various ways, most of which were very humane and none of which involved being eaten alive by a cat.