From hell's heart I stab at thee! Or maybe it's the other way around.

[firstfrost]

Our house has some mice. I saw one last week, which usually means there are many, so I've been putting out traps. Mousetraps are tricky - I snap them on my fingers half the time putting them down, but if I don't, then they aren't hair-trigger enough to go off, and the mice eat the peanut butter without setting off the trap. harrock does not get to set traps, after having taken pliers to his first trap to make it easier to set, resulting in it being nearly impervious to impact.

I've caught six mice, with probably a 50% success rate, and I tend to think of the traps that get their peanut butter nibbled off as the ones that the 'smart mouse' got to, and the mice that get caught as the 'dumb mouse'. It's a more dramatic story in my head, with the smart mouse, master mouse-thief, doing Indiana Jones tricks with the peanut butter and a bag of sand. Not that I've caught a bag of sand yet.

This morning, my mouse nemesis had STOLEN THE TRAP. The trap was *GONE*. Nowhere in the kitchen that we could reach.

They're coming out of the walls! They stole the trap! What do you mean they stole the trap, man, they're animals!

Except I'm probably the monster, and he's the awesome mouse thief hero, now probably missing a hand or a tail or something, vowing vengeance. He's probably saving the trap for later, and I'll find it on my pillow when it snaps on my ear.

Comments

[nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com]

I mush up a bit of bread with the peanut butter, and it hardens into a clump that really sticks to the bait thing pretty well. (And for rats, I use a piece of Slim Jim, with a piece of dental floss threaded through it, so it can be tied down to the bait thing.)