A Late Night Visitor

Okay. So I get home late last night from visiting my grandma (whom I adore) and discover in my kitchen a tiny rodent running along the baseboard. Yes--you understood correctly there was (and still is) a mouse in my apartment. I don't like mice. I don't want a mouse in my house, but I also don't want to see the thing dead...so here I am at 11:30 last night trying to figure out a humane way to catch this mouse--with no luck.

So I call Toby who's in D.C. this weekend and leave a message because I assume she's sleeping what with the 2 hour time difference...to let her know there's a mouse. I just needed someone to tell. I was pretty sure my dad would have just laughed at me if I'd called him.

So then the phone rings and its Toby and she talks me down from my midnight mouse hunt saying that I can buy a trap in the morning and then she hangs up (that's the abbreviated story).

I happened to remember that downstairs there are a couple of squares of mouse paper that the previous downstairs tenants had set out to catch spiders (Mrs. O) was deathly afraid of them. If you've never looked at the back of a sheet of mouse paper you should...its kind of funny...there are all these "Do Not Let These Things Come Into Contact With This Paper" warnings...and one of the pictures is of a mouse...kinda funny.

So I bring one upstairs and bait it with some cheese from the fridge and go to bed...after blocking all of the cracks under the doors so the mouse doesn't attack me (I had an oh-so-memorable experience as a child where a mouse "tap danced" across my head while I was in bed one night which I have no desire to repeat).

This morning I get up to get ready for work and discover that somehow the mouse has managed to get the cheese but escape the sticky peril of the mouse paper. So I re-baited the paper with a tortilla strip salad topping dipped in peanut butter and left for the day...I really hope he's good and stuck when I get home tonight.

Meanwhile, I've come up with an idea for a better mouse trap. Some computer geek needs to invent an electronic mouse trap that would send out an email alert to let you know when the mouse is caught. You can get email alerts for things like library books and flights, why not mouse traps?