The Keychain Eater

January 29, 2012

This is a familiar feeling. Disgust, annoyance, repulsion and violent stirrings, all blended into a special kind of hatred reserved for rodents that eat your food and poop on your floor while you sleep.

Dedicated readers of this blog know of my long struggle with bats. I've lived four months bat-free and I consider bat-proofing my house one of the most significant accomplishments of my service*. Yesterday, a mouse placed himself, like pigeon poop on a windshield, irrevocably on my radar and by doing so has provoked war.

For days, I've been finding little turds. I mean little turds. So I was having trouble diagnosing the poop. Mouse? Giant gecko? Other? But, like America during WW2, I just kept watch without acting. Then Mouse bombed Pearl Harbor.

In November, another volunteer who often says I remind her of her son, gave me a key chain made out of string, beads, and two local seeds that many use as necklaces. It was cool and I was touched to receive a hand made gift for no particular reason.

Then the mouse fucking ate it.

I wake up, walk to my dresser to get breakfast stuff, and my key chain is in pieces. This would have baffled me if mice didn't have the IQs of postage stamps. There were mystery turds all around but now in such quantities that they were unmistakably mouse turds. I mean really, if he had just pooped somewhere else, I might not have figured out how the key chain broke. Because, if food is missing or partially eaten, then yeah, I figure something ate it. But a key chain made of string, beads and seeds?

Already enraged, I checked the only food I had left out of Tupperware – three pounds of fresh beans I had purchased the day before. Sure enough, there were beans scattered around, with incriminating turds close by. Moron. Does he realize who he's dealing with?

Later that day, I mentioned the Key Chain Incident to a community member and they nodded and told me the mouse was using the string and beads to make a nest.

A nest?! Oh HELL no.

When I got home, I heard a sound on the rafters of my house and looked up to see the perpetrator himself. He froze and I pointed right at him and said, “You're gonna die.” I actually did that. I worry about myself sometimes.

Another community member lent me his mouse trap – a cage. Tonight, the key chain is gone and the only food outside of Tupperware is inside the mouse trap. I don't know what I'll do if I catch him, but I think it might involve a machete.

*Is that sad?

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January 31, 2012

I caught him. And then he friggin escaped. Here's the story:

After finishing the above blog post, I went to bed and was just dozing off when WHAM, I hear the cage snap shut. For a few minutes, I just lay there smiling. This was so EASY, I was thinking. It took me like six months to finally end my bat problems and I dealt with this mouse thing in ONE DAY, I was thinking.

The villain

So up I go, optimistic and filled with violent ideas that I probably shouldn’t publish on the public domain, and there he is, Mouse, darting around the cage, looking for an escape. I taunted him. I took his picture. I put on a pair of work gloves and brought the cage outside. I remember thinking that the door closed in a particularly ominous fashion.

The trap's door opens like, well, a trap door, and every time I started opening it, the Mouse would make for the exit. Strategizing, I finally decided to shake him to the bottom, open the door just enough and quickly grab him. I did this. I missed. Mouse made for the forest. Cursing, I ran after him, feeling suddenly foolish running doubled over in the night in my boxers, headlamp and work gloves.

Mouse showed me how his species has survived so many years on our competitive planet. Always against the wall, he ran fast and dodged skillfully and eventually I lost him.

I returned to bed, angry and wondering if I had lost my one good chance to get him in that cage. After all, we use mice for brain experiments right?

Today, I used my massive human brain to concoct a plan: disguise the cage and put it somewhere else. I'm counting on that postage stamp IQ. The cage now has a raisin box carpet and brand new rag paneling. In this way, it looks just like a a cage with a shirt draped over it. He'll never know.

Hopefully, I'm dealing with Pinky and not Brain.

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February 1^st, 2012

A better mouse trap

Definitely Pinky. At 3:00am last night, I heard the now familiar snapping of the trap door. I considered sleeping through it and doing some killing in the morning. Would you like some murder with your oatmeal? But Mouse was shaking, rattling and almost rolling the cage in his futile efforts to escape and the noise just didn't jive with my desire to sleep. So up I went.

Multiple people in my town had suggested killing the mouse with a stick, so that I wouldn't have to open the door and risk another escape. So I grabbed a pointed object and tried to stab. Those multiple people clearly hadn't actually tried killing a mouse like this, because I don't think it's possible. Mice are, like, fast and stuff, and trying to poke it through the cage allowed limited mobility. After trying this for all of 25 seconds, I chose my backup plan – setting the mouse on fire with mind bullets.

After 25 minutes of intense but fruitless concentration, I moved on to plan C: I put a garbage bag on the door end of the cage and shook Mouse into it. If you like mice or are an animal rights activist, you should probably stop reading before I tell you about how I slammed the bag into the ground a few times and thus avenged my key chain. I figure this can't be any worse than getting chopped in half by a mouse trap.

So ended my mouse problem. I hope. Today, I've lived in this house for one year and mice haven't been an issue until this little keychain-eater, so I'm hoping this was an anomaly. I'm also hoping that avenging a key chain doesn't indicate that I've completely lost it, because it really seemed like a logical course of action.