Mouse...and I'm not talking Mickey!

So really our story begins a year ago at this exact time. You know how this time of year it can start to get pretty darn cold at night, even as it warms a little during the day? Well, it can lead to some unpleasant things when you have an older home with a large field for a backyard.

Last year about this time I remember it was a Monday and I had just come back from my all girl weekend. I had taken that Monday off and was enjoying a relaxing day with Nate. We were in a good mood because he had been called for a second interview for the job he now has. We had just finished dinner and settled in to watch our Monday evening shows when our Taylor started acting a little bit nutty. She ran into our back room in the basement, which is our office. She didn't come out for the longest time, so Nate decided to go check on her.

He didn't come out of the office either. I yelled back "is she ok?" And he says "yeah" kind of slowly and still doesn't come back out. I decided to go see what was going on. Nate is looking at the floor and moved a box. As soon as he did this large black thing came darting after me. I did what any girl would do of course - screamed and jumped up on the office chair. I thought it was a bug, but Nate said "no, I believe we have a mouse." After a trip to Wal-Mart for some supplies, we had a long night of trapping not just one mouse, but several mice. Sadly all we had was a live trap, so Nate just kept getting up all night and emptying it out. He found holes outside the house where he thought they had come in, patched them all and figured we'd be good to go. And we were. For the whole next year anyway.

Fast forward to Fall 2009.

He had left the live trap just up in the ceiling in the office as a "just in case" type measure. This morning, I got up to do my workout and as I got into the basement I could hear a strange scratching noise. Perplexed I wandered around and made sure one of the cats had not gotten trapped somewhere. They were both accounted for. I still could hear the noise and thought it was very strange. Then it dawned on me.

So, I went upstairs to get Nate out of bed since his alarm had gone off anyway and asked him if indeed the trap was still set. He said "yeah, why?" So I told him about the noises. He checked it out and sure enough, we had a mouse. Nate's rather confused by this though, because he plugged up nearly every hole after this happened last year. I guess those little guys will get in anyway! So we dealt with it as best as we could for this morning, he'll attack the problem more tonight. We're both more calm about the whole thing this year, but I still wish we didn't have to deal with it!

Oh yeah, I've said it before, but I'll say it again - the myth about having cats in your house and not getting mice - totally false!! And yeah, Taylor and Pippin, not the best hunters in the entire world, nor do I think I want them to be!