The Minor Details

I killed Mickey Mouse.

OK, I didn’t kill the ACTUAL Mickey Mouse, but recently I did get the pleasure of killing A mouse, or to be more exact, 16 mice – you see, lately, my home has become overrun with these annoying creatures, so I decided it was time to put my foot down.

It all started, well, when I moved into this place. I started noticing little mouse poops everywhere – in my closet, in the kitchen, in the drawers, on the floor – I even noticed holes in my clothes (including one of my favorite Kutless T-shirts – THE NERVE!). Last winter, we didn’t have much luck catching them, but I could hear them moving around, taunting me with their little scratches behind the walls.

The last straw came almost a month ago now. At about 4 a.m. I awoke with a start, hearing rustling in the kitchen. Turning the lights on, I heard rustling coming from an open shopping bag in our pantry. As I looked into the bag, there I saw little Mickey Mouse, running around haplessly.

“Aww, look what you gone and did?” I asked the filthy beast, taunting it, as it has no doubt taunted me in the past. Thoughts of unimaginable cruelty came over me…ways to torture this poor animal, to teach it (as well as its friends) a lesson. Then I thought to myself…

“It’s 4 a.m. – it can wait until morning…” and with that, I removed the bag from the pantry and moved it across the kitchen so I could think about what to do with it in the morning.

When I woke up, I walked with a purpose to the kitchen and moved right to the bag, and sure enough, there it was, sitting there, afraid…

“Good…” I said, doing my best impression of a James Bond villain. “Now you will feel the wrath of Adam Minor!”

I didn’t particularly care to do anything incredibly violent to the thing…after all, I didn’t want to make a mess, and also because I am not COMPLETELY brutal and heartless. So I decided on a more humane death. I filled up our bathroom trash container about halfway with water, tipped the bag upside down and sent our furry little friend for a little swim. Then, I proceeded to get ready for work and leave the mouse to swim around for a while, so it could think about what it did.

When I returned home, about 8 hours later, I checked in on my furry friend, half expecting him to be doing laps, perhaps a backstroke – instead, the mouse was dead and floating in the water like a buoy.

“Eh, oh well,” I said to myself as I tossed the carcass in the woods behind the house as a message to his furry little friends.  THIS IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF YOU ENTER MY DOMAIN.

However, I was about to learn – mice don’t take to threats very well.

After the “November Mouse Drowning Incident,” Sarah and I decided it was a little thing we like to call “GO TIME.” We went to Wal-Mart and bought four De-Con traps, which trap the mouse inside so all you have to do is throw them away when they are trapped. Within 24 hours of setting them up, all four traps were snapped. Kill count: 5.

“It’s going to be a long winter.”

Seeing that we had just spent nearly $10 on traps and they were already all used up, we knew we couldn’t go on spending crazy amounts of money on traps – after all, there’s this thing called RENT that needs to get taken of -  so we searched out some re-usable De-Con snap traps, which contain a housing over a traditional old-fashioned “don’t-you-dare-get-your-finger-caught-in-that-trap” trap. Just throw in a little peanut butter, pull the trap back, and wait for that glorious sound.

SNAP!

Sure enough, over the course of a week, our traps were a flurry of activity – every morning, I would wake up to dead mice in our traps in our kitchen and closet area. Eventually, the kill count was up to 15, with 10 kills over a period of  five days, and we knew we had an epidemic on our hands. I remember waking up one night as one of our traps went off (it had to be like 4 a.m.) and just smiling as I knew we had one less beast to worry about, then drifting off to sleep…

Our last kill, to this point, is byfar the most unique, and maybe that’s because I didn’t even use a trap.  You see, last Tuesday, Sarah and I were watching my favorite television program, Hannah Montana (OK I’m just kidding – or am I?) and out of nowhere a kamikaze mouse comes bounding out from underneath the couch.

After recovering from the initial shock and a mild heart attack (and after completing a shrill girl scream that made my wife’s eyes roll), I decided that enough was enough. The mouse had to die. After finally hunting down the nearest broom (the best weapon I could come up with at the time) I hunted down that mouse like a crazed lion stalking a gazelle. Finally, I trapped the thing in our office, and it just sat there, no doubt saying its final words to itself, which were most likely, “Squeak Squeaken Squeaky,” which is Mouse-Speak for “AHHHHHH!” because no sooner than I saw him, I had the broom high over my head, and with a primal scream stolen straight out of a heavy metal chorus, I brought down the wrath of God on that mouse. Kill count: 16.

We haven’t had a mouse since. Perhaps tales of the latest victim’s violent end has reached its home village, and his friends are now retreating in terror of my power. Maybe Mayor Mouse has decreed that Minortopia is no longer a suitable habitat for his people because of his tribe’s heavy losses. Maybe I killed the entire tribe. Maybe I killed Mayor Mouse himself. Who knows? They all look the same to me.

Is there a lesson to be learned from this story? Perhaps. Maybe the lesson is that I take WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too much pleasure in killing mice. Maybe I should see someone about that (is it wrong that I currently have a competition going on with a co-worker to see who can kill the most mice this winter?). Maybe the lesson is that I need to block the many openings there may be into the house (and believe me, there are many).

Maybe not. After all, I think I’d rather get rid of them. I’m not sick. I’m just defensive. You don’t mess with my Kutless T-Shirt! Once that happens, you and your family will experience my wrath, it’s as simple as that. So, to all you mouse lovers out there, sorry, I guess I’m a natural born mouse killer. No regrets.

Anywho, if you’ve killed more than 16 mice this winter so far, please, let me know, so I don’t feel like the only one dealing with this!

R.I.P. Mickey

Setting the trap, and waiting patiently for number 17,

Adam