It’s been a rough year This mouse is dead meat

Note: It’s the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and to tell you the truth, I am plumb worn out with a complete lack of energy. It’s been a long, hard year, and the prospects for 2022 come with no guarantee as to how the pandemic will play out — good, bad, or ugly.

We can only hope for the good.

That being said, I have three long interviews on file from which I had plans to write three main news/feature stories this week, but again, my energy pool is drained. So, what’s a newspaper guy to do to fill the front page? How about resurrect a story about a mouse written back in 2011 (what a difference a decade makes).

I thought the story was lost from my hard drive, and then just recently, I happened to stumble across it. I probably jinxed myself when I thought, wow, it’s been 10 years and I haven’t had a mouse problem since. Now I’m waiting for a new one to show up. Anyway, Happy 2022, for you and your family. Let the mouse story first published in 2011 begin, and may no more meese (intentional misspelling) appear at the Wendorf home:

You want to know when I first sat down at my computer this morning? Three a.m. Why? Because I’m in a war with a house mouse, and the rodent is winning.

About two years ago, I used to leave my garage door cracked during the summer, so it wouldn’t be, without a window for cross ventilation, oh, 120 degrees inside during July.

Actually, in the Rio Grande Valley, summers begin April 1 and extend through Halloween, so figure seven months the garage is a boiler.

I found out, leaving the garage door open is a dumb thing to do. Why? Because mice crawl into it when it’s cracked open 6 inches. Then they chew a hole into the ceiling, then they get into the attic. Last time this happened, it took me about four days to catch him.

So, I no longer leave my garage door open, but the mouse got in anyway.

This happened last Sunday. Jan, my wife, and I had just had company for the past four days, and we were looking forward to a break before Monday kicked in, with me pulling couch potato duty while watching the PGA Transitions golf tournament while my wife did her own thing. Feet up on the sofa, a cold glass of tea nearby, and nothing but a day of relaxation. That’s when the mouse showed up.

The first sound I heard was in the master bathroom. Coming from the ceiling. Dang if it wasn’t a mouse, dropping down the vent somehow into the light fixture, and then looking like Rocky the Squirrel, he jumped over to the top of the bathroom cabinet.

So I shoved a towel under the door, and headed over to the store to pick up some mouse traps.

“How big is it?” the store clerk asked. If I told her, she wouldn’t be too happy, so I downplayed it, oh, about this long.

Actually, the mouse I had seen, still thankfully stuck in the bathroom looked like he might have taken some human growth hormones at some point in time, tried out for the NFL, so big was he. A past or former user of steroids at the very least. Mouse was a beast.

“I’ll be right back,” I told her, thinking that I might just nip this thing in the bud in no time, and still enjoy Sunday on the couch.

While I was in the store, of course, my cell phone rang and I saw it was home. With a mouse caught in the bathroom, this can’t be good news.

“You know that mouse you had trapped in the bathroom?”

“Yeah?” I said, not really wanting to hear the punchline. Well, he’s out now.”

“What do you mean, out?” “He’s out. I was going into the outer bathroom, and I saw him run across the floor, and it looked like he went into the closet. Apparently he found a way to push out those towels you had down plugging up the space under the door.”

Just great. Now we’re going to have a closet full of clothes and other things, all of which are going to smell bad once the big mouse gets done doing his thing in there.

I finished shopping — a live trap, and three spring-loaded kill traps. I’d give him a chance to leave our house alive, and let him go in some nearby field, next to a house that belongs to someone I don’t like, hoping he’ll move there. But if the mouse doesn’t leave voluntarily, he’s going to die.

That was more than a week ago, and he’s still alive.

I’ve tried everything on him, including some expensive $35 gizmo that promises to electrocute him as he heads into a tunnel baited with peanut butter that no mouse can ignore. I know I was a sucker to buy it, but after most conventional mouse traps fail, you’ll try anything.

Which is what the people who make the $35 gizmo probably first thought up –—“Sure, $35 is expensive. But if someone’s had a mouse in their house for a week, and can’t get rid of him, they’ll pay anything to get rid of em, ho, ho, ho.”

Sure thing. Even the big mouse traps didn’t work. I’ve had luck with them in the past, but this time, no go. He stole the peanut butter and cheese, but didn’t trigger the trap.

I got my pest control guy on the phone and explained the problem to him.

“It’s overkill,” he said. “The trap is too big for the mouse you’re trying to catch. You need some smaller mouse traps.”

So I went back to the store and got some smaller traps.

The clerks nodded at me as I walked in. They were getting used to me by now.

The smaller traps didn’t work either. He (I’m assuming it’s a he, since it’ll be easier to kill him if I think that way) still stole the cheese and peanut butter, and the smaller trap wasn’t tripped either.

Then one day, the towels I had lining the bottom of the closet door, meant to keep the mouse in, was pushed out.

So where is he now? This was Sunday, a week after we had first encountered each other.

The next morning, I could tell he had gotten into the dog food and was now probably in the pantry. I got a towel, and plugged the space under that door too, but not before I had laid a few kill traps on the pantry floor.

Finally, after admitting defeat, I got out the sticky pads, guaranteed, or so it says on the packaging, to catch any size mouse, or even a rat for that matter. I even got the heavy duty pads since he’s a big mouse and most likely a rat.

Monday night, I slept on the couch. There was a kill trap inside the pantry, and two sticky pads by the side of the washing machine. I’ll catch him yet. We were ready for action.

Under the stove

A little past midnight, I could hear him making sounds over by the washing machine. That made it impossible to sleep, of course, so I laid awake watching the minutes tick by, hoping he would step onto one of those sticky pads, so I could box him up, and finally get some rest.

At 2:30 this morning (Tuesday), what a racket. Clearly, he was finally stuck to the glue/sticky pad, and I had him.

I ran over to the side of the washing machine, bumping my knee into the corner of the coffee table as I passed by, and could see him doing his best to get away. I used the clothes hamper to pin him against the door, while, stupid me, I went to the garage to get a box, which I had forgotten to make handy the night before.

One minute later, I was back in the kitchen. Just as I was ready to move away the hamper and put the box over him, the sucker took off across the kitchen floor, like Mickey Mouse on speed, with the glue pad still stuck to him, and disappeared under the stove, back to the furthest reaches against the wall.

So, at 2:35 this morning, I’m standing in the middle of the kitchen, with an empty box in my hand, the mouse under the stove, and I’m about to swear, slit my wrists, when I realize, maybe if I can get a stick of some sort and reach under the stove, I can fish him out.

What sort of pole can I use to fish him out? I know, I’ll go back out to the garage and get one of my golf clubs. A 3-iron should do it. Long and the blade is flat.

So now I’m down on my hands and knees in the middle of the kitchen floor, Tuesday morning, and by now it’s 2:50, so I’m just a little bit past angry at this rodent. When I get my hands on him.

Come on, you little ... get on out of there.

When I drag out the glue/sticky pad, the mouse isn’t attached to it. He’s broken free. I can’t hear him, but I have no doubt he’s in the back, dark corner under the stove laughing at me — “Pinche vato, you no catch me.”

To make matters worse, to add insult to injury, my golf club is now coated with the glue that normally sits on top of the sticky pad.

So, it’s now 3 a.m., and I still got no mouse, but I do have a messed-up golf club, and it looks like the glue’s going to be a bear to remove, while apparently the mouse broke away free.

I never did get any more sleep. It’s now 2 p.m., Tuesday, as I write this. Maybe I can catch a nap before long. Because I have no doubt, tonight is going to be another battle to catch him.

So what’s the moral to this story?

I’m going to go out and buy me a cat and try to invent a better way to catch a mouse or a rat, because whatever you say about them, they are smarter than I am, and there is currently nothing available on the market to level the playing field. The rodent is smarter than me, faster than me, and has more stamina.

Plus, he’s probably a lot younger.