"Therrrrs a Moose in the Hoose!"

Earlier this year (February, I think) Barry called me one night after rehearsal while I was driving home.

Barry: We have a moose in the hoose (imagine a Scot's dialect).
Sally: A what?
B: A moose! A mouse.
S: A mouse? You're sure? Not a rat?
B: No, a mouse with big ears. It ran behind the telly and into the heat vent.
S: Hmm..

So when I get home I set a trap for little mousie. Four months later I've heard him several times, but never actually seen said 'moose' and the traps have been totally ignored. Then the other day I open my cupboard to get out some flour and notice that my flour bag has a hole in it. "BAD WORDS, BAD WORDS!!!" were said profusly. So our little mouse was doing more than scurrying about being cute, huh?

Well, actually, I had seen evidence of him in the closet where I had hung my ham to cure. Lucky for me the mouse doesn't like cracked pepper, so he only chewed through the wrapping and when he got to the ham covered in pepper he must have sneezed and walked away as no damage was done to the ham. (NB: Alison will be glad to hear that yes, this is THE ham she has been waiting for lo these many years. Should be ready by end of summer.) The hams have been re-wrapped and now hang safely in the kitchen where I can keep an eye on them. Have I mentioned I love the tall ceilings in our house?Anyway, back to the mouse. After saving what flour I could (he'd only chewed through the bottom corner, I set the mousetrap, covered it in flour and left it where the bag had been.

Tick, tock...

Next morning Barry is out working on a landscaping job in Tucker, the dogs are all sleeping in their room and I keep hearing this banging sound from the kitchen. I shout "Lysander, stop nosing the cabinet door!", but I realize he is (for once) completely innocent. Ah! Could it be? Has my mousetrap worked? Yes, it has.


I open the cabinet door to find flour everywhere and a little mouse with his food caught in the trap desperately trying to get away. "Got you now you little thief!", I say as I think about offing the little guy. But when I pick up the trap I see that I have caught, not an ordinary mouse, but a Disney Mouse, ala Desperaux. Great big ears, big dark eyes looking at me with sadness. Crap. He's too cute to kill. Crap. What do I do now? Okay, after a quick phone call to Barry, I grab a Mason jar, put the trap and mouse down into it and open the trap enough to free the mouse foot. I can tell his leg is broken, but otherwise he is very active and aware, and even jumps up to try and escape the jar.


The dogs were fascinated by the little thing moving in the jar. Kiki jumped up on the bench to have a closer look. Knowing my dogs they wouldn't have done anything to him but watched him run away, should they have gotten the chance to 'play' with him. He's too small even for a snack.




.


...In the end, I decided to let him go back into the wild, but far from our house so we didn't have him return and commit more heinous crimes. I took him about three miles away to "The Farm" where the Apparition of the Virgin Mary apparently showed herself from 1990-98.

http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-750

Oddly, this is one of the first weird news stories I remember upon moving to Atlanta in 1990. I thought, "Wow, glad I don't live near that crazy Conyers. It's waaaay OTP* anyway". Big LOL!!! Now I'm living less than three miles from the site. Life is strange, isn't it?

I figure a little lame mouse needs all the help he can get, and at least he won't be eating my flour any more.











*OTP for non Atlantans is 'Outside the Perimeter', which is the I-285 corridor, and those living OTP are either bumpkins, boring farts, or Republicans. I am none of the above, but think farmer should be added to the list for OTPers.