Friday, September 5, 2008

my kitchen is enemy territory after dark

we have a mouse. a big fat rat-sized mouse. i hate mice. i hate them.
so, we had a mouse last march also. he was eating away at the bottom of our pantry door. he didn/t get into any food, but we would wake up in the morning and there would be gnawed off shreds of pantry door on the floor. so we called maintenance and they came and set up a 'snappy' trap and two mornings later when we got up there was a big bloody mousey mess in the kitchen. problem solved, right??? wrong!!!
a couple months later we once again found mouse poo in our 'stinky little room' (a.k.a. the laundry room. my 8 year old niece dubbed it the stinky little room one night when she was over and the name unfortunately fits because it/s where the trash can full of dirty diapers is). we called maintenance and this time they put poison out in the wall and around the outside of the building. the poo stopped showing up so we figured all was good. problem solved, right??? wrong!!!
we went to tallahassee a couple weeks ago and when we got home voila!! more poo. this time, the poo was out in the kitchen. i told tracy we had another mouse and we figured we'd call maintenance again. however, that night as i was laying in bed i wondered if maybe it could have been frog poo. i had brought our potted plants in from our lanai when ts fay was supposed to hit us, and i saw at least one frog jump off the plants and into our garbage disposal (stupid frog). so over the next several days, we went back and forth on whether it was frog or mouse leaving us little presents.
we went to val/s house last weekend because my parents are here. i was out in the garage smoking and found some poo there that was about the same size as what was getting left in our kitchen. so i called my mom out. she said yep, it looked like frog poo to her. so yay!!! frog.
there was no food (or pantry doors) getting laid into, no shredded cereal boxes or holes in vyni's banana puffs. it had been almost two weeks since the poo started to appear. i did wonder what a frog would be eating for two weeks in our apartment to leave so much poo, but we do have some bugs. so we figured. . .
wednesday night i looked behind the dryer for poo and there was none. tracy and i had finally decided that it was definitely frog and that eventually it would run out of food and shrivel up and die. i had a load of laundry in the dryer, and tracy had one in the washer that she needed dried for work the next day. i put a laundry basket in there so she could just throw my load into it when she was ready to put hers into the dryer and i went off to bed.
so thursday morning, i needed to get vyn a pair of shorts from that laundry in the stinky little room. tracy was at the kitchen counter packing her lunch or something. i scrunched by her, opened the door to the stinky little room, flipped on the light, leaned over and picked up the laundry basket and MOUSE THE SIZE OF TEXAS goes running in crazy circles. (looking back, i think when i turned the light on the little rodent probably thought he was hiding behind the basket. so when i picked it up he was just out in the middle of no-man/s land)
okay, so as i said my parents are here. my mom stays at val/s when they come, but my dad stays with us. so he/s asleep on the couch. well, here's mouse running in crazy circles and i start screaming. i am, however, aware that my dad is asleep on the couch, so i/m trying to scream quietly. i was not successful. my mind said to scream quietly, but what got transmitted to my mouth was to scream low. so instead of a high pitched "eek" it was more like a bellowed "uhhh" over and over and over. i try to run to the family room so i could jump up on the furniture and get away from the critter, but tracy was in the path. when i started to bellow, she started to run (she later told me her thought was that maybe there was an aligator in our laundry) but she was not moving NEAR fast enough to placate me. i was just envisioning the monster mouse coming and biting at my heels. so i/m high-stepping it - literally- to keep my feet off the ground as much as possible so the mouse can/t get them while i/m half an inch behind tracy and wishing she would just put it into a higher gear and GO, and bellowing 'uhhh' 'uhhh' uhhh' over and over.
needless to say, my dad woke up. my baby in her bed in our room woke up. the mouse got away. the maintenance man was called and brought glue traps this time. and my sister and dad made fun of me all night last night and have warned me i will not live this down for a long long time.

1 comment:

Valarie said...

When I first started reading, I was soo worried you were going to post the picture of the dead mouse! Ick! Thank you for not.