House of Mouse

Apparently my parents had been hearing him in the walls for several days, but I didn’t find out about the mouse until I saw the tidy pile of insulation in front of the new mouse hole by our sliding glass door a week or so ago.

We haven’t had a mouse in our house for a really long time, because we have always had outdoor cats who are more than willing to kill mice and other small rodents and leave them on the porch for us to trip over in the morning. We still have two outdoor cats, but they seem to be falling down on the job, because, you know – mouse.

Our indoor cats are no better. Evidently they’ve become fat and pampered and see no reason to go chasing after a mouse when they can eat table scraps in addition to their twice-daily feedings. Wait. Evidently? No, most certainly. Besides, it would not surprise me at all to learn that our indoor cats prefer cooked meat to raw meat.

So. We see this insulation one morning and Sadie’s all trying to stick her little snout down in the mouse hole and my parents are like, “Eh, let’s stop feeding the cats and he’ll be gone in a couple of days.”

Except that we haven’t, and he isn’t, and no one seems to be all that concerned about it.

We kind of half-heartedly talked about getting some glue traps and putting them out, but no one’s done that yet, and I have a feeling that all a glue trap will do is provide our lazy-ass cats with a captive toy, or else the mouse will avoid the trap and a cat will get her paw stuck in it. Besides, he spends most of his time in the walls.

For a while, everyone had heard him in the walls except me, because I’m a super heavy sleeper and would never be awakened by a mouse scratching around in the walls. But since I’ve been sick this week, I’ve had a lot of trouble sleeping, and I’ve definitely heard him scritchy-scratching around in there. Sometimes I would vaguely worry that he’ll chew through an electrical cord and start a house fire, but that’s mostly because I have a tendency to be paranoid and disaster-oriented in the most bizarre circumstances.

When I was home sick on Tuesday I heard something thumping in my heating vent and thought Dad was under the house working on it. But when I got out of bed to investigate, he was in the living room.

“Something’s thumping in my heating vent,” I told him, and he said he’d heard it too. “Must be the mouse.”

And that was it.

The next evening I was working on the computer on the other end of the house and THAT heating vent started to thump. I told Jamie to go tell Dad about the thumping and he’s like, “Duh, it’s the MOUSE.”

Right. The mouse. The mouse that we totally, completely don’t care about. The mouse with quite possibly the sweetest living arrangement in the history of Earth.

I guess we should be concerned about him. He’s probably chewing things up. He might be a she and she might have mouse babies in our walls and that might turn out to be super weird. But for whatever reason, we’re all very “eh, whatever” about our mouse. We will probably continue to be “eh, whatever” about him until he runs across one of our feet in an early morning darkened kitchen, and then we’ll be after his mousy ass for real.

But then, I’m kind of attached to him. He’s just there, hanging out in our walls. The cats and dogs know there’s another creature around, because they can smell him, and once in a while I’ll catch the cats sitting around a heating vent looking in and I figure he’s down there. They seem nearly as concerned about his existence as we are, though, and again – that level of concern appears to be totally, completely, not at all existent.