Mice!

Recently received in an email: “Your blog has been entertaining but light on "Alice's life" details lately. How do expect people to stalk you properly when you don't disclose more aspects of your personal life?”

Good point, anonymous commenter. Good point. (Not that I encourage the stalking. Cause I really don’t think I have time for it. And now that I have proper curtains, I think the whole stalking proposition will be far less appealing to the peeping Toms out there.)

So, what’s going on in Alice’s life? Mice. That’s what.

Little horrible, disease carrying, terrible, scary (and yet disarmingly cute) mice.

Imagine, if you will. I am in my bathroom, brushing my teeth. And what do I see running from the steps in the kitchen to the bathroom door? A mouse.

Now, do I scream? Do I leap onto the toilet seat and start shrieking like a housewife in a 1950’s sitcom? No, I do not.

I think, “Aw crap. Not again.”

I do, however, shriek when I see the second mouse run across the floor as I'm standing in the kitchen. This is, of course, after I am already aware that the mice are there. I am ridiculous.

But I digress.

As many of you* may remember, I have had these issues before. It was autumn 1998. Steph and I were living in the basement apartment on Palmerston. And the mice, they invaded.

Twice.

The first time, we tried the traps. I became a heartless mouse killing machine. Steph discovered that she’s a bit of a wuss when it comes to dead rodents. And yet, no matter how many we killed, there was always another to fall out of the kitchen cupboard when you open it in the middle of the night. And let me tell you, you haven't heard shrieking until you've been attacked by an airborne mouse in the dark.

Finally, we got rid of them when we cat-sat for my parent’s cat Max. Max may have been hugely overweight and lazy, but she was a mouse killing machine. She scared them away, and they stayed away. Excellent kitty.

Then they came back. Like a horror movie – they just wouldn’t stay dead. (Okay, we didn’t have zombie mice. They were just regular mice. But still – ew!) By that point Steph had fled the apartment. Clever girl. So, I was facing the second mouse invasion alone.

Since traps hadn’t worked the first time, I tried poison. Ahhh, poison. I was told how it works, and even though it’s really really not pretty, I didn’t care. Like I said - heartless. And it seemed to be doing the trick. The damned mice were being defeated. I had beaten the rodent invasion!

Only not really. The mice refused to leave. Even though they were poisoned and dying, they were still so stubborn. And then I got my kitty. (Not to kill the mice. Because she was so pretty. I'm not that heartless.) And my kitty scared away the mice. And I’d really rather not get into the upsetting details of the whole cat-eating-poisoned-mouse-emergency-trip-to-vet-do-you-know-how-hard-it-is-to-give-a-cat-pills period of time. But the mice, they were gone.

And then I moved country and lived in three different flats before moving into this new one. This new flat that I love. Except for the mouse thing. I do not love the mice.

So, the weekend was spent cleaning. Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. And buying a rubbish bin for the kitchen. Turns out a garbage bag on the floor is a little too mouse friendly. I really hope they were confined to the kitchen. I did have a dream that I felt one of them walking across my feet as I slept. And I choose to believe it was a dream, thank you very much.

I hope they’re gone. I really do. If they’re not, then it’s time to get a cat.

I wonder what the fishes will think about that?

* Ha! I like to believe that there are “many” of you out there. Delusional? Perhaps.