Experienced Trappers We Are Not

Ever since we saw our first mouse run across our living room floor and dive behind a book shelf back in April, we have been tirelessly trying to get rid of it (them? we had no idea how many there were).

This mouse continuously made a near-nightly ritual of running through our living room and stashing itself away behind our DVD collection. It would usually cause me to scream and crawl up on the couch and not get down for quite some time.

We decided to trap the mouse one night using a mixing bowl. It was my job to drop the mixing bowl on top of the mouse. We weren't sure what we were going to do after that. We pried the shelving away from the wall and the mouse darted out. What ensued was something of this nature:



It was disastrous. As the mouse, in a confused panic, flitted around at my feet, I was shrieking uncontrollably and trying to avoid having the mouse come into contact with me in anyway. I ended up slamming the mixing bowl down on the ground approximately 15 full seconds after it escaped. I was still screaming.

This is when we discovered that this was not the way to catch mice. We purchased spring traps and glue traps. For two months the mice courageously licked peanut butter off the spring traps and side-stepped around the glue traps.

Our fruitless attempts instilled in me a strong sense of inadequacy that we could not somehow outsmart the little guys. Not even our building maintenance knew what to do.

The boldest move our maintenance guys made in helping us to rid the apartment of mice was taking a sheet of one of my paper towels and stuffing it in a hole in the floor near our living room radiator. I was very uncertain about this method considering I was pretty sure mice liked to use that kind of stuff as bedding and enjoyed chewing it into a soft pulp. The paper towel disappeared shortly thereafter and I am sure a happy litter of baby mice are napping comfortably in it as I write this.

We weren't even sure the glue traps were even sticky anymore when we left for our four day trip to the Cape a few weeks ago.

This leads to my next story.