OF MICE AND MEN

I used to like the movie Ratatouille. Now I hate it. I only watch Tom and Jerry now to take notes and study the enemy. We use these notes to design good offensive tactics to fight the enemy. Speedy Gonzalez shows are especially helpful but depressing. How can he run so fast! My mice seem to run faster than Speedy Gonzalez and Jerry combined.

I’m writing this current paragraph months after the one above, and I would love to tell you that we got rid of the mice. We tried maze traps, live catch traps, poison, snap traps--nothing worked. It was like they knew and they would laugh at us. One time my roommate Sumi and Haley (who was visiting at the time) saw a mouse glaring at them from inside the toaster one morning (the mice would get up on the kitchen counter and go to town on the food people left there. I would tell them not to do that, but. . . One day as the sun was coming up (mice are nocturnal like the Twilight vampires) a mouse was trying to go back to their nest wherever it was and he was exiting the living area through a small dime-sized hole in the fireplace, but he got stuck (he had a little too big of feast last night). So in the morning when people came down they saw half a mouse and a tail wiggling and struggling to get inside the fire place to wherever they were coming from. No one knew what to do. Do we get a knife and chop the body in half? (animal lovers are hating me right now) Should we not do anything? Should we do something if we could think of something that was more than anything but less than everything? We didn’t know. Eventually he popped through after all that struggle back to some nesting area in the walls or back outside or in our garage.

In fact in trying to find the holes in the house through which they entered the house, I was standing outside checking the cracks or opening in the house, and that’s when my neighbor called the police on me. Oh well.

Like I said, I would love to tell you that we got rid of the mice ourselves, but what happened was something more unimaginable than we could have fathomed. . . . . . . . . . . . .spring. I have never been more thankful for spring and more in debt to it. With the warmer weather they no longer seemed to care to come in the house and they went on their way. They are gone. I am happy. And I will never watch Ratatouille again. I don’t like the movie. Yes, I know that when November rolls around they may be back. But let me say this. THIS time we have some electronic ultrasound thing you plug in the house and it keeps them away. The mice first disappeared when we cleaned the kitchen and sealed everything up, but they might have come back with the cold weather. So we’ll see if we need the ultrasound plug-ins. I hope not, but winter is coming again, and we don’t have a cat. . . .