and it ain't that cute one from Disney. Sigh. I'm not sure who is more affronted, me or the dog. Me, because I really don't want to deal with this. The dog, because the mouse pooped in her food bowl. [g] Scully was NOT thrilled. But at least she didn't try to roll in it. We must have looked a sight, the two of us. Me, freshly woken up, hair sticking up everywhere, glasses on crooked, hands on hips, staring down into her food bowl. And the dog, standing next to me, head down, staring into her food bowl.
I thought we had a visitor a few months ago when we got that first batch of nice weather. One Saturday afternoon I left the back door open for the dog so she could wander in and out at will. Early Sunday morning she woke me up whining in the laundry room/sun porch. This was not her "I want out" whine. Oh, no. It was the "mommy, save me, I'm being brave but there's something in the house I don't recognize" whine. When I got to her, she was doing that lunge forward/jump back thing she does when she's afraid but doesn't want to show it. [Mom, you might remember that from the time your feather duster almost gave her cardiac arrest!] Anyway. I could not figure out what it was. Her attention definitely centered around the "closet" in the laundry room/sunporch, but I couldn't find anything. And she stopped paying attention shortly after I got there. I surmised that is was just another ploy to get me out of bed. Sigh.
I guess I was wrong! However, this is the first sign I've seen of the mouse. Nothing in the cupboards or cabinets or laundry room closet. (I've sorted it out several times since then.) And I've been keeping an eye out for it...so maybe it's a new visitor.
The dilemma now is: use the live trap and set it free somewhere, or use a trap that kills it and be faced with a dead rodent I must dispose of. I really don't like killing live beings. Well, unless it's a spider and it's in my house. My new-agey self just can't cross that hurdle yet. I'm probably accruing all sorts of bad spider karma. But I don't know about walking around with a live mouse either. Knowing my luck, it's probably a rat. I thought about borrowing someone's cat for the weekend. You know. A really good mouser. Unfortunately, I'd probably just end up with mouse parts on my living room floor. Or my bed. Which reminds me of a former coworker who woke up one night to find the cat lying on top of his wife (my coworker's, not the cat's), contentedly munching on a mouse. Oh, the horror!
[All you non-city folk can stop laughing at me now.]
