Not for PETA

I thought we had gotten off scot free this winter. I hadn't heard any mouse noises at night and thought maybe, just maybe, we weren't going to get any this year. But the mice had other plans. The farmer had been out fertilizing his field with steer manure two weeks ago. (Yes, it smells like I live on the farm and not in town. But I keep telling myself it's better than having neighbors.) And the smell must have driven the mice indoors. While my poor family was here we were overrun!

Friday night we were sitting around chatting when Sister Quilter gave out a squeal of terror.

"What? What's Wrong?" I asked.

"You have a mouse in your kitchen!"

"Oh, darn. I thought I wasn't going to get any this year, but I guess they found our house after all." and I shrugged my shoulders.

"Aren't you going to do anything about them?" she asked, debating on whether she should get a hotel if I wasn't going to take care of the problem right then and there.

"Well, Olaf is gone and I don't know how to set those mouse traps. Maybe Younger Brother (who was also visiting this weekend) will know how to set them." I nonchalantly replied. When you live next to a field you just know despite your best efforts that some mice are going to wiggle their way into the house.

"Yeah, I don't kill mice. Don't have a clue as to how to set those crazy things," Younger Brother replied while pounding away on the guitar, acing Guitar Hero.

"Where are they? Maybe we can set them," she demanded. Now let me tell you, we have tried various types of traps and have found the best ones are the Victor Snap Traps that we buy at Albertson's. Unfortunately, they no longer sell them.
I got the traps out and we proceeded to try and figure out how to set those things without taking our fingers off. A two-year-old probably could have figured it out faster than we did. But after 15 painstaking minutes, in which Sister Quilter's fingers only got trapped once, we finally figured it out! Once we learned how to set the trap we had the task of setting them carefully on the floor so they didn't snap our fingers off at that point. Let me remind you that Olaf was out of town and wouldn't be back until 1am and I wasn't relying on him to set the traps in the middle of the night, that would be cruel and unusual punishment. Even though he's experienced he'd probably lose some fingers.

We were so proud of ourselves when we got three traps set in the usual places. And before we went to bed that night we caught the mouse Sister Quilter had seen earlier! Then in the morning we had two more dead in the traps. We were so successful at our first try! The second night Olaf set a couple traps and caught one within five minutes! By the end of the weekend we had caught eight mice. I think that was the lot of them though, we haven't caught any since. I think since Sister Quilter had just invested in a Mouse Exterminator at her house, they decided to haunt her while she was at my house.