Our first victim... in the new house

At some point we must've crossed him. It could've been that we bought property and started building directly on top of the land where he used to live. It could be that he was tired of being out in the cold, and wanted to come in for the warmth. Regardless of why he was there... we knew he'd cause mischief.

Katie and I were cleaning up in the garage shortly after moving in when she saw something move quickly behind one of our boxes. She went and gave a closer look and saw a little mouse peeking out from behind a box... just sort of checking her out. As would be expected, she calmly let me know that there was a mouse in the garage... by flailing around and screaming "I just saw a mouse... go look, over there!". As if she didn't know for sure it was a mouse. "Yep, it's a mouse. Big ears, hairy, whiskers, tail... that's the one."

Anywho, she gave me orders to kill the little thing and picked up the killing devices on her lunch break one day that week. On advice from the cashier, I set one up with peanut butter... after fiddling with them trying to figure out how they worked without snapping one of my fingers in half... and left it against a wall, ready to kill.

The strange thing was that we didn't get him anytime soon... it's been a month since I set that trap. He managed to hang out, either inside or out of the house, and even managed to find the only piece of food left in the garage - Katie's Times Square souvenier hershey bar and nibble off the edges. We'd not had any other sign of him until tonight when Katie went to grab the wrapping paper out of the garage, and I heard the familiar frantic yelling and soon saw the flailing arms again. We'd finally gotten the mouse, and it was my job to clean it up. So, with a pair of kitchen tongs I grabbed the mouse trap (with mouse attached) and dropped it into a wal-mart bag and then into the trash can outside.

I'm not sure that I'm all that happy about killing the little guy. I'm beginning to think that I may be going about this problem all wrong. I don't necessarily have anything against mice... and don't really wanna kill them. We just don't want them in OUR house. With this in mind, I've decided I'll just rub peanut butter all over the neighbor's house. Problem solved.