Skooks' mouse wasn't the only one, not by half. I started seeing the little beggars poking their wee heads up through the burners on the stove, and got on the phone to the nice Pestilential Doom people in Nanaimo, who sent a young woman right out Monday fore last and snooped around. She left me a few traps and showed me how and where to set them, and said we didn't need their full nine yards, as we didn't have a confabulation of mice, just the odd one coming in from the cold and getting snuggly with our cooking gear.
She left, I set the traps and then (it being lunch time) did up a bit a lunch and sat down at table with it and a good book. I don't remember which book, but I do remember the sound of a mousetrap ripping the life from another of God's creatures as I chewed. I'd always wondered what it meant when food turned to ashes in one's mouth. 'S what I get for wondering.
The next one snuffed it later that afternoon, while I was on the phone to Nola. It went out screaming.
The third went to its maker that night, thankfully silently, and after that I was pretty much hardened. To date the total stands at Skookum: 2, Me: 4. But Skooks still gets the edge, as she dealt with hers using only her own cunning.
And the rain falls and falls and falls. All the rain I could have wished for, and did wish for, this summer. The pond is overflowing and I've had to rake leaves and other carry from the creek to keep it from backing up at the bends and overreaching its bounds. ScottyThePlumber kindly came out this morning to verify that the pressure tank in our basement is not actually leaking; there was a trickle coming from under it last night that worried me desperately. Goodness knows what is going on exactly down there, but for sure groundwater is welling up. It's the very definition of too much of a good thing.
Today saw only sprinkles, and tomorrow is supposed to be similar. After that we're back to solid rain, and the really worrying part is that, as soon as this South Pacific Event moves on, temps will crash. Environment Canada keeps showing flurry icons at the far end of their five-day forecast, have done for a couple weeks. It keeps raining instead, but there it is. When the rain is done, all this water's gonna freeze.
pondering sudden death while swaying to the dulcet tones of A Million Miles Away from the album "Free" by Jann Arden
2 Comments
At the last place we rented we had mice. Large primary cat loves toy mice, and would play with them all the time, going so far as to chew their tails off. But he wouldn’t catch any real mice that we could see, so Michael had to set out traps.
Second mouse caught in the trap was missing a tail.
Luckily, small secondary cat turned out to be a good mouser.
It’s the rain. We’ve had so much in the last two months. It’s been near constant. Nola checked the shed Sunday and said it was all over mouse droppings, and there is no food in there to attract them.