Ding Dong, The Mouse Is Dead

I mentioned last week that there was a mouse in my car. Here's how it went down: I got in the car at 6:30 in the morning two weeks ago today to go to work. It was pouring down rain, I had the wipers on and was about to back out of the driveway when I saw something zip towards the front of the car on the passenger side floorboard. Just a shadow from the wipers, I thought, but then - zip - it ran back the other direction. Shadow? In the dark and the rain? Zip -it ran back to the front, and ZIP! I was outta there.

I ran in the house and up the stairs and woke up my husband by shouting, "THERE'S A MOUSE IN THE CAR!" He rolled over, pulled his CPAP mask off (sexy, I know), and said, "What?" "THERE'S A FUCKING MOUSE IN MY CARRRRRRR!!!" I replied, and he said, "What do you want me to do about it right now?" "TRADE CARS WITH ME" I responded. He tried to say something along the lines of it will be fine, just drive it to work, and I was getting VERY PISSY as I was now going to be late to work, oh, and THERE WAS A MOUSE IN THE CAR when my daughter, who happened to be home for a couple of days, came in the room and said she would move my car out of the driveway so I could take the other one (right after she got in my car to move it, she realized SHE was now driving a car with a live mouse running around, and had it run past, which it fortunately didn't, she surely would have driven right into the side of the house).

My husband took the mouse mobile to Walmart later in the morning and bought mouse traps and glue boards, then liberally, and I mean LIBERALLY spread peanut butter on all of them, including putting a dollop in the middle of the glue board. I saw this when I came home that afternoon, looked in the car, and saw that he had put five traps, a glue board, and the what must have been half of a jar of peanut butter in there. There was so much peanut butter, in fact, that my little mouse friend was able to eat for several days off it and only set off one trap, and no, he did not meet his end doing so. I could envision the mouse lying on his back next to a trap, reaching a little mousy arm out and taking swipes from the peanut butter, then lazily licking his gooey mouse fingers IN MY CAR.

By Thursday, all the peanut butter was gone.

That afternoon, before leaving town for 4th of July weekend, my husband reloaded the traps and we left town (in the other car, of course). There were two problems with that: one, I REPEATEDLY asked him to put the traps inside empty cracker or cereal boxes with a hole cut in the corner, so when the inevitable (hopefully)  happened, there would be no, um, mousy bodily fluids on the interior of the car, and two: we were going to be gone for FIVE DAYS in July in the midwest with temperatures in the 90s. He did neither.

I tried not to dwell on it over the long holiday weekend. When we got home Tuesday evening, the first thing my husband did when we got out of the car was to check the mouse mobile, and immediately crowed, "I got him!"

And yes, yes, he DID get him, but not before the little fucker drug the glue board onto two umbrellas and a tarp and then perished rather untidily in a trap. My husband did the removal, I continued to refuse to drive the car until the traps, peanut butter, and mouse turds were cleaned up. 

On Saturday, my husband took the car out to run errands, and apparently, the first errand he felt was a priority was to buy a giant bottle of Febreze and spray the entire contents all over the inside of the car. Hmmmm. I then spent half an hour with a shop vac removing every last trace of poo while my husband tried to get sticky glue board residue off of two umbrellas and a tarp. Hmmmm. On the advice of my dad, I also stuffed dryer sheets under all the seats (it's supposed to deter future mice from moving in with a bonus of giving off a fresh scent).

The car still smells like peanut butter and not very fresh mouse and clean laundry, but it's MOUSE FREE.

And that's my Ten Things of Thankful post, because not only is the mouse dead, but he (or she) didn't bring nine other members of its family to take up residence in my car (and yes, I checked EVERYWHERE).

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