mini poops scattered about - nope, not a one
little gnaw marks on plastic bags full of cookies - also nope
the patter-skid of little mouse feet when you walk into the kitchen - thankfully, uh uh
a half eaten piece of cheese strategically left out on the couter - nope, the freaking chunk of cheese didn't have so much as whisker marks on it from a curious mouse sniffing
So, how do I know there is a mouse in the house . . . b/c it keeps eating my tomatoes. Every morning I walk out to my garden and I pick a bountiful supply of tomatoes. I bring them inside and put them in this nice little wicker'ish basket. And there they sit until I get home in the evening and make a salad or a sauce or slice up some mozz and basil.
Well the other morning as I was loading up the wicker basket with a new batch of maters I noticed that one of the ones on the top from yesterday's heap had the middle chewed out of it. I was flabbergasted. Only one of them was eaten out of and the little bugger didn't even have the courtesy to finish it. Just a few mouse mouthfulls and off he went.
I really wasn't convinced it was a mouse b/c it was only one tomato and it was sort of a smallish "bite" and all the other dry goods on our counter top were left totally unmolested. So I thought maybe it was a bug of some sort. Well the next morning, same thing, different tomato. So, I took to covering my wicker basket-o-tomatoes with a plate. This seemed to work rather effectively for several days. And I figured it was totally some icky punk bug and not a mouse and moved on. I mean a tomato eating mouse? Odd, right?
Then one evening I forgot to replace the plate after using some of the tomatoes. The next morning, TWO tomatoes had bite holes in their middles. The little stinker had totally just been waiting for me to get careless. So now I am finding it really hard to believe that this is a a bug b/c, not that mice are known for their acumen but I sort of couldn't bring myself to credit a bug with that sort of laying in wait strategery.
My counter move? I put a piece of cheese right in front of the wicker basket and went to bed. The next morning . . . NADA. I dunno maybe there is some sort of mouse school they all go to that teaches them that if ever there is cheese just laying about it is most certainly a trap. But whatever, this mouse bypassed the cheese and went straight for the tomatoes.
I actually started getting suspicious that this was Kelly, sneaking into the kitchen after I had gone to bed and carving out a little hole in the tomatoes just to get a kick out of me getting all worked up and playing Nancy Drew and the Mysterious Vegetarian Mouse. I in fact became some convinced of this that I confronted her on it when I found yet another gnawed on tomato After she worked through her fit of laughter she pointed out that there were actually little mouse teeth marks on the tomato.
So, we have a mouse in the house. Kelly wants to kill it. I am having a hard time getting on board with that. She said that if I could find a way to gently trap it she'd be happy to go dispose of it in some field somewhere. As of yet I have not found any mouse traps that do not either snap the neck of the the mouse or glue his little feet to a box bottom until he starves to death. I dislike both of those options.
I sort of feel like my tomato plants are yielding enough tomatoes for both of us. And I am intrigued by this little guy. I mean what sort of mouse bypasses cheese for veggies? A special sort of mouse, I say. . . and I think Erica would agree.
In case you were wondering why I keep using the masculine pronoun to refer to the mouse, I think it is because when I was a kid two of my favorite books were Stuart Little and The Mouse and the Motorcycle. Both of those mice were boy mice.
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