We've had a mouse for a long time. We first noticed him a few months ago when we were still sleeping in the living room on the air mattress. He was behind the stove, clanging about. For a few nights, he woke us up with his noisiness. Then I began research on homemade mousetraps online.
I saw several varieties. Most involve some sort of tunnel or bottle that the mouse runs into from a horizontal surface and then by the time he gets to the end, his weight is enough to topple the tube into a waiting trashcan below. Like so:
I finally settled on this one (below), because our mouse hadn't progressed to the counter tops or table. (So the tube method would be more difficult, involving a ramp and other materials.) I rigged it on a baking sheet with heavy baking dish on top and a piece of cheese on the end of the bamboo skewer.
Lo and behold, we caught him that very night! I was amazed! He was a good size, too. Sometimes mice are SO tiny. This was early in my mouse-hunting career and I wanted Rich to bring him to work so we could release him on GW Parkway, where he would make himself a nice burrow and eat berries and flax... or something like that. Oh, how times changed.
In what I thought was a very careful attempt to extricate him from under the baking dish and into a manila envelope, he escaped. Behind the bookshelf, into the bathroom, out into the hallway and into the unknown, back to safety... It was depressing.
I was undaunted, though, because I naively thought, "Well, I'll just set the trap out again tonight." He didn't bite. In fact, we didn't hear from him for a while. But he came back eventually, and he was more brazen than ever. We began to hear him in the early evening. Then a couple of times we SAW him. The first time, we had him cornered under the bookshelves and we stuffed a towel under his escape door. Guess we didn't plug it enough, cause he burrowed his way out.
By this time, I had named given him the name Sandy. It was the gayest boy name I could think of. Plus, I connote it with stupidity. (You'll recall that in "Growing Pains," Carol's boyfriend who was killed driving drunk was named Sandy. While that behavior is probably not best described as "stupid," when I saw it at age 9, that's what I thought.)
These are pictures from the last time we saw him in the living room. It was July 31, the day after I finished the bar. We were watching "Georgia Rule" when we saw him run under the changing table. We immediately flew into action. Our plan was to have me flush him out and then Rich would pounce on him with a large piece of Gladware. We moved everything that would hinder us to the center of the rug.
When he ran from the changing table to under the couch (a favorite hideout), we got serious. I put tape under all the appliances in the kitchen so that if he ran in there, we'd have him cornered and he couldn't escape. Now, Sandy doesn't just go under the couch. He has several holes in the lining under the couch, and he actually goes in the couch. So what do you think I did? Cut the whole lining off and flipped the couch over!
We couldn't see him anywhere, so we figured we'd just have to wait for him to come out of the couch. We flipped it back right side up and I jumped up and down several times while Rich waited in the kitchen with his Gladware. Nothing.
Finally we sat down, tired and defeated. Sandy had eluded us again! The next week I bought six mousetraps and laid them out like I had read in another article. (You should lay them out, multiples in a row, so that the mouse will be caught as he runs along the wall.) Here are some under the bookshelf. Three days later, no mouse.
So yesterday was our anniversary. I got home from worship practice just in time to sit down with Rich on the couch and reflect on our three years of marriage. I suggested that we say three thing (for three years) that we liked about being married to each other. After we had each shared one thing, I said, "Honey, not to be rude, but you smell like garbage." (He had been doing the dishes.) I smelled his shirt and hands--no scent. Rich confirmed that he smelled it, too.
We began searching for the smell. I finally smelled the trashcan--no smell. Then I smelled the floor. Stinky. "Could it be Sandy?" I wondered. We flipped the couch, and with our flashlight, sure enough, we saw a little tail. We figured that when I jumped on the couch to get him to fall out last Thursday, I smushed him and he fell onto a piece of foam and was perched there until we found him last night.
