So.
Our basement is essentially open to the elements, which means that any number of critters could make a home there if we lived closer to the woods.1 However, critters that normally live outside the woods occasionally make their way there, where they can be nice and cozy and break into the pasta and goldfish crackers that we keep in the basement.
Which means that about once a year we have to get rid of mice. Fortunately, I’ve found an inexpensive, humane, and effective mousetrap that’s basically a combination habitrail and mouse escape room, where the mouse goes in to get peanut butter and the door snaps shut and later the mouse takes a car ride to some field a good distance away from our house and gets released into a new green paradise and then gets eaten by an owl, probably.
I think we have at least two mice in the house right now. Or had.
Last night I caught one of them in the living room around babbycwabs bedtime and set it on the front porch so it wouldn’t be a temptation if a 4-year-old got up before I did and I could drop it off on the way to work very early the next morning.
Only the next morning it wasn’t where I’d set it, and a cursory investigation didn’t reveal where it might have, like, fallen off.
I texted my wife:
Me: Did you dispose of the mouse?
Ladycwabs: No
Me: It was not on the table out front this morning
Me: Do you think it was cat people
Ladycwabs: 🤷♀️
Me: Weird
Ladycwabs: He might’ve gotten back in, based on rustling sounds
Me: Where’s the trap? I didn’t see it.
Ladycwabs: No idea 😳
Me: So someone let the mouse out and stole the trap from our front porch between 8pm and 6am?
Ladycwabs: I don’t know. That seems bizarre.
Me: I guess a neighborhood cat could have gotten to it and batted it into the flower bed, but at some point we’d have to find the mouse trap.
…Later that day…
Ladycwabs: [sends picture of mouse trap in a location that’s about six feet from where I placed it]
Me: No mouse? The evidence suggests that one of the neighborhood cats had some fun.
Ladycwabs: Oh, the mouse is still there. I’ll try to drop him off when I go to get Babbycwabs
Me: Okay. So frustrated cat. And absolutely terrified mouse.
Ladycwabs: He’s still kicking, tho.
Ladycwabs: Now a VUMC resident
So at some point last night, our friend the mouse, who was already probably traumatized by being in custody, became a Kong Toy for I presume the calico stray who I’ve spotted in the alley and on our sidewalk more than a few times.
I’d feel sorry for him, but one day he’ll have a substack and it will have content, not just something I’m writing down so I can remember it later.
We live close to the woods, but I imagine the critters would have their pick of hundreds of other basements before getting to ours.