Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Friday, Aug. 29, 2003 - 9:09 p.m.

"It's not about the money."
Yes, it is. Shut up.

Sorry. Had to get that out of my system.

So, this is what I learned about mice. Last night. At 2 am.

1. They are very fast.

2. They are also extremely resourceful. (read: crafty little bastards)

So, me and TB are in bed last night, watching a Discovery program, because we are all curious and intellectual and all that propaganda crap, and I am suddenly distracted and think to myself, "did I just see something moving on the curtains?" So I look over at the curtains, brow all furrowed, trying to figure out whether or not my eyes were playing tricks on me, when suddenly, yes, I do indeed see a mouse-shaped dark object moving up...and then down...and then back up the curtains.

"Uh..." I say.
"Wow," says The Boyfriend.

Yes, we are utterly brilliant conversationalists. And even more brilliant observationalists.

"What do we do now?" I ask, because frankly, this is paramount to me, not liking - as I do not - lizards, frogs, bats, insects - or indeed, vermin - in my house. And certainly not in my sleeping quarters.

So The Boyfriend gets up and opens the screen door (the sliding glass was already open, which is how we think the little dickens got in) while I move over to the light switch, and we try to best figure out how to peacefully transfer a quickly moving mouse from the curtains inside, where he ought not to be, to the big giant outside, where he should be.

Turns out all planning in this area at this time is completely erroneous, because you will vastly underestimate a) the agility of your target, and b) the speed and cunning of the little nemesis.

But we are blissfully ignorant of this fact at the moment in question, so like two blithering - albeit in our defense inexperienced - idiots, I flip on the light while The Boyfriend attempts to simultaneously flick the mouse off of the curtains and thru the outside door.

You may now laugh contemptuously at our idiocy. Go ahead; I know you want to.

The mouse - being of infinitely higher intelligence - and agility - than either of us - does what any sane, thinking mouse would do at this time: he dives off of the curtains, bounces off of the floor, fakes a run to the closet on the right, and streaks instead straight under the bed.

We are somewhat plussed, my friends.

"Wow," says The Boyfriend, "did you see that? He is really fast."

Ya think?

Now, here's where it gets serious. See, The Boyfriend's house is rather small. It's in a great spot, on top of a mountain, with great views and all that, but it's small. Which means that, what with all his accumulated possessions, and my accumulated possessions, and the possessions we have accumulated in the last 2.5 years of living together, there's not quite enough room to put everything. So since it has fallen to me to stow those things that we tend to use on a semi-regular basis and that I can't let him lock away in storage, and since I have packrat-like tendencies - which, oddly enough, do NOT align me with the bewhiskered little intruder under the bed - the underside of said bed is pretty crammed with belongings. Things like the roll-away storage box that serves as my shirt and lingerie drawer, the big Rubbermaid container full of wrapping paper and supplies, my turntable (yes, I have a turntable; I like vinyl - sue me), several items I just do not know what to do with, some shoes, my journal, a coupla books and magazines, and various and sundry items I stuck under there so long ago I couldn't tell you what they are to save my life. Oh yeah - one of them is the basket with all my foundational upper garments in it. So you can see that it is now a monumental pain in the ASS that a rodent has decided to use the space as cover. Frickin' mouse.

But we are not to be deterred, so The Boyfriend takes the broom I fetched and the flashlight he fetched, and I take the only sane position in the room, which is up on the bed, and we agree that I will stay safely perched on high and keep watch on the far side of the bed while TB pokes around and tries to flush the mouse out from the non-outside-door side of the bed. Good plan, right?

Yeah, no.

The mouse will not be flushed. He will briefly make flashes of appearance in which I very inarticulately try to tell The Boyfriend where he is, but he will not be flushed. So this necessitates pulling a great many things out from under the bed, which the more female of my readers will know then leads to discussions and uncalled for comments about the stowage of certain items and how it's time to let things go and how could one person possibly need so many bras or pairs of shoes, and why do I need that little roller box thingie anyway, and frankly, I would rather have slept with the mouse than The Boyfriend, had the situation been less dire. I will not go into the ridiculousness of handing me the basket which had formerly held my foundational upper garments and expecting me to trap the mouse under the basket when clearly what we were dealing with was a mouse the likes of which made Speedy Gonzales look like Slowpoke Rodriguez. At some point, the mouse made a dash for the corner, underneath a cabinet, and the search switched focus from the bed to that, which resulted in the mouse's ingenious charge into the closet.

::sigh::

We now have a mouse in the closet. Which is full of shoes. And clothes, because when I left for Paris, I left a bunch of stuff lying on the bed and a fresh laundry basket worth of clothes sitting near the closet, so of course what The Boyfriend did was shove the basket into the closet and throw all the clothes on the bed into a heap on the basket, and I had not yet girded my loins to deal with this insurmountable pile of laundry, so now, that is sitting there in the closet mocking me and providing prime hiding place for the furry little version of Rocky I swear I could hear mocking us as he made his incredibly fast, lightninglike dash across the carpet.

Friggin' mouse.

So. The Boyfriend goes out to his office and fetches some whiteboards, which we use to make a barrier in an attempt to curtail further escape by the mouse into the wide reaches of the rest of the house. And then he pokes around under another cabinet in the closet, but the mouse doesn't seem to have run under it. So we start pulling clothes out of the closet and shaking them out, so that the pointy-nosed villain can not use them to skyrocket out of the closet. And we toss those shaken-not-stirred garments on the bed. So I shake out a dress, toss it onto the bed, and in mid-toss, Evil Kenievel leaps out of the folds of the dress, scurries between my feet, and thru the barrier, which turns out not to have been quite as effective as we had hoped, and straight back into the closet again. Finally, a break.

We think we know where he is, so we shore up the barrier and continue to shake out clothing, more aggressively this time, until the closet is empty of hanging stuffs. This leaves the laundry basket and the shoes. First goes the basket. Nothing. So The Boyfriend starts on the shoes, and for some unknown and inexplicable reason, holds them way the hell up as he pokes and peers into each one of them, far above the barrier, so that Mario Andretti can leap easily out of them and into the rest of the room. No matter how many times I pointed this possibility out to him, he blithely ignored it. So of course, the damn mouse did indeed leap out of one of them and across The Boyfriend's arm, but luckily in the direction of the closet and not me or the room, so I was spared the carnage that would surely have followed had a mouse used me as a temporary trampoline or once again hidden beneath the bed or in the pile of laundry now on my side of the barrier. We finally corralled him into this little space, but not before The Boyfriend proved that he sucks at teamwork and said some not nice things which resulted in his cluelessly getting The Look Of Death and a silent avowel to kick his ass if he said one more word.

So there was another mad break on the part of the mouse, in which we thought he had gotten away but he turned out to only be faking us out, but I was not totally taken in by the ruse, and finally, the mouse ran into my sneaker we left in the space for just that purpose, and I tactfully - though not without some degree of malice - suggested The Boyfriend use the pillowcase he was holding to trap the shoe and mouse inside of and dispose of them far, far away, at least at the foot of the drive, down by the mailbox, where I know it isn't nice to say, but perhaps one of the many owls frequenting the neighborhood might have a tasty late night snack, and that was pretty much the end of that.

I am not a very forgiving person.

So by then it was 4:30, and we put all the clothes back in the closet and moved the laundry out into the hall, so I will spend my weekend doing washing, and we climbed once more into bed, where I informed The Boyfriend he is NOT a nice person and needs to work on his team skills, and we pondered methods for keeping mice out of the house and the virtues of cats, and then finally got to sleep around 6 am.

I am happy to say I did not dream of mice.

Peace out,
Katie

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