I have had the privilege of spending some great time with my mom over the past few weeks as she recovers from her hip replacement surgery.  I have been staying in her apartment and have managed to get a few things straightened up and cleaned out for her while she is in rehab so that it is not so overwhelming when she comes back home.

I alluded to the fact that there was a four legged visitor of the rodent variety in a post last week but that it was gone.  Well guess what?  It wasn’t.

I was sitting on the couch talking to my best friend Ann the other night when it streaked across the floor in front of me to corner where the heating and AC unit is.  YIKES!  I thought he was gone.  Obviously the one that was caught in the stairwell was a close relative.

As I looked further I found that maintenance had placed traps around the apartment sometime during the day while I was with my mom. I had told them at the main desk about the mouse so I guess they made it to the 4th floor with some nice new traps while I was with my mom.

So I weighed my options.

Do I try to catch this little booger on my own or let the traps do their work?

I tried to get him in a pitcher but he was having nothing to do with that so I gave up and went to bed.

But I took precautions. 

I know you are riveted to this compelling story of “Catch A Mouse” so i don’t want to disappoint you.  When I crept out of my room the next morning I found this.

Trap 1  Mouse 0

I must admit I was thrilled to know that one mouse was no longer going to have fun of my mom’s apartment.

My brother Mark is a wildlife biologist so I had been texted him asking his advice on the mousecapade.  He is a manly man and not afraid of these little rodents.  If truth be told he might actually have loved them at times as I remember he caught them to feed various animals that he kept when we were growing up.  It was not uncommon to have a bread sack full of mice in our freezer and yes–there was the time my mom set some out to thaw thinking they were meatballs…..

But I digress.  At one place he lived and worked in Oregon years ago he had an infestation of mice in outbuildings.  It was really overrun with mice and he set out to do something about it.  He told me that he bought a “buttload of traps” and set out 15-20 in a close configuration in 4 or 5 places each night.  He was quite successful as you can see from the picture. 

Check out that guy at the top of picture who had the misfortune to get caught in two traps.

In the morning he would take them and toss the corpses out and had a few ravens that hung around specifically for the mouse caracas feast that was about to occur.

While I felt slightly sad that I was part of killing a mouse he assured me that they were probably Mus musculus which is a European mouse and not even native.  That made me feel better.

I am winding my way homeward to North Carolina today leaving my mom in the hands of the professionals.  I have been blessed to have had this time with her and know that any remaining time she has in rehab will fly by.  We have had some good times and her apartment is less one mouse which is how she would like to return to it.