it gets worse. that little fucker didn't just come into my home and EYESIGHT (seriously dude, we live in the country. feel free to hide in my walls where i will never notice you. the moment you come into sight, it's on) he entered from my COUCH underneath my FEET.
that little bug eyed, furry, disease-ridden mammal had the audacity to pick a fight with my giant cat underneath my very legs, tangled up in my lovely, soft blankets. IS HE KIDDING?! the most sickening part is that they were apparently fighting for minutes until he decided that, i don't know, he was warm underneath all of those layers, and decided to peace out and head for my kitchen.
my thoughts were, "wtf are both hooper and cheryl so interested in?....oh. it's a GD mouse!!!!!!"
this is where it gets embarrassing. there are things your dick brain does to you that you can't explain. it's the excuse all mothers everywhere use when they want to win an argument ("you wouldn't understand... you're not a mother."). so when i saw this mouse walking across my floor having previously been underneath my legs, at first i was like, "aw. a cute mouse. MOUSE!" then my brain went into overdrive. the mouse ran under a shoe and my fatass cat nonchalantly walked over debating whether to kill it. i ran around in circles screaming obscenities and debating whether to cry, smash it with a shoe (oh gross, please no) or something else drastic. kevin was out of town and it was late.
i ultimately decided to jump onto the opposite part of the couch, call kevin and threaten to never feed hooper again if she didn't just "destroy that fucking mouse NOW, bitch". i seriously debated finding a cheap ass motel to stay in because i could no longer trust anything in my home. then i remembered that any motel i could afford would probably have its own mice and lots of other gross stuff too. (32 flavors, anyone? of semen?)
hooper took for-e-verrr to kill this mouse. the little dick ran under the arch of kevin's shoe so she couldn't immediately rip him up. at one point she even walked away! i screamed at her, "if you don't kill that thing NOW i will never feed you again! do you hear me!? you will be forced to kill other mice for food because you were unwilling to eliminate this one!" she looked at me for a hard second and then got back to work. if there's one thing hooper understands, it's food.
she killed it, but left it under the shoe. for me, that wasn't good enough. i was majorly freaking out. i was still on the phone with kevin and i had been yelling the whole time. i yelled at kevin for being in detroit. i yelled at cheryl for being interested in the mouse which could potentially make it run away, which would fuck everything up because then fatty kitty wouldn't be able to catch it. i yelled at kevin some more, and then i yelled in general about my lack of knowledge and bravery needed to continue from my point atop the couch. i yelled at hooper to "keep killing it!" even though it was more than likely already dead.
what if this mouse was just really patient? he had already dodged my cat and dog for 5 minutes in my freshly laundered blankets, then meandered across my floor at a slow pace before jogging to the nearest shoe to avoid death. i wasn't about to believe this guy was dead until i saw it. i kept yelling at hooper and she endured me with the kindness a mother would give her poor, scared, stupid child, a two year old that was irrationally begging her to check the closet for monsters. she kept trying to walk away and i would yell at her to come back. she finally flipped over the shoe, pushed it out and ripped off a piece of its back.
excellent. there was no doubt now. that cocksucker had drawn its last breath right where he let his ego take control. let its ghost mouse be cursed to roam the earth, warning all of its mouse buddies so they know never to show up in my household.
the mouse being dead did little to aid the situation. i still had to dispose of it. kevin wasn't going to be home for 2 weeks. my excellent neighbor, jeremy, was my only hope. i had to check the time, 9:50, he may still be awake. i quickly hung up the phone with kevin and texted jerm that there was a mouse problem and he had to solve it asap. because he is an awesome neighbor, he agreed to come over and dispose of the gross mouseness in my living room.
he got rid of it but then proceeded to tell me that the mouse was FAT and probably had babies somewhere, maybe under my couch. "go shake it out and see if any other mice run out."
uh, no thanks. you need to come back and do that, sir. once again, because he is an awesome neighbor, he came back in and shook out my couch to make sure there were no more mice. so far, so good. as i write this, it's been about an hour and i haven't seen another mouse.
but seriously? i can't believe my reaction to mice. it's completely nonsensical. after jeremy went home, i spent 10 minutes soaking cotton balls with peppermint oil and throwing them randomly about my house. mice supposedly hate peppermint oil. that's not rational behavior; a tiny mouse shouldn't freak me out in such a way. they're completely harmless, mostly. something about them though...
my whole house reeks of peppermint.
so it's been a couple of days and there was another one this morning!! i almost stepped on it. i think the universe is playing a cruel joke on me, getting me so close to accidentally touching gross mice.
i woke up this morning with the distinct feeling i should put on my slippers. these things are fuzzy and big and meant for winter, not the beginning of summer, but whatever. i was walking to take cheryl out when i saw a dark spot on the hardwood. I thought, "hmm. i don't remember that dark spot being there. maybe i should turn the light on and make sure it's not another asshole mouse."
guess what.
it was another stupid mouse. apparently i am no good at dishing out curses. i only married an italian; apparently the magic didn't transfer over... again i say, fuck mice. it was too early to call Jerm, so i was going to have to deal with this stupid dead rodent myself. here was the problem though, it wasn't bleeding. it didn't appear cut. it was just frozen. maybe it had JUST frozen in fear because it had just seen hooper.
i stood there for a second and wondered what to do. i wasn't frozen in fear because hooper's track record is 2:0 and i've never actually seen a mouse alive in my house for more than a minute. my good buddy, the best cat ever, hooper was right there and she didn't seem to bothered, so everything was probably ok. still, a rigid dead mouse is icky, and i wasn't about to pick it up. i tiptoed past it to continue taking cheryl out while i figured out what to do.
then this happened:
this was in the breezeway (which is where the dogs go out so there's grass and dog hair everywhere. welcome to my gross life). absolute confirmation that this mouse was probably really dead for suresies. i like to think hooper tortured this little fucker for DARING to enter our house. guess what, dude? we don't practice kindness is this household, buddy. there isn't one of those stupid "in this house we..." things on our walls. if there was, it would read, "in this house we rip up ballsy little rodents who dare to show their face". germans aren't any good at curses, but we understand revenge.
i ended up double raking the mouse out of my house. I used one small, metal rake to flip the little bastard onto a bigger, plastic rake. The exit out of the house was eventful. Because the rake was so wide, it kept hitting things, making the mouse body jump around. I kept fearing that I was going to jolt it awake, that it was a fighter and it was just waiting for the moment to strike. Every time it jumped and flipped on the rake I screamed at it to, "stay dead! stop moving!"
once i got outside, i got a little more cocky. i threw insults at this stupid dead mouse as i flung him into the bushes and missed. then again as i raked him back into the bushes.
stay out of my house, rodents.
i'm going to come back from detroit on tuesday and there'll be mouse carcasses everywhere...
