No time for a potty mouse

It’s fall. The meeces are back.

I’m one with Mr. Jinx… Pixie and Dixie may be cute, but I too “hate meeces to pieces!”

And they’re back. I spotted one scampering from the kitchen range to beneath the fridge a couple nights ago, and I’m quite certain a romantic couple have set up mousekeeping under the sink.

The uninvited house guests don't come as much of a surprise. It's September and time for the annual mousy migration. Every year, with the first hint of the chills to come, the little critters find their way from the neighboring parks, meadows and fetid swamps to settle into my kitchen, linen closet or laundry room. I guess it stands to reason, lacking the wherewithal to purchase itty-bitty parkas or pay their own NSP bills, they move in with me ... sort of like unemployed offspring with fur.

I can't say I blame them. I wouldn't care to live outdoors through a Minnesota winter, especially if I had a long, naked tail to keep warm. Actually, I think they’re counting on me to be sort of a softy. Y’see, all through my tender, developmental years I spent countless television-saturated house regaled by the likes of Mighty Mouse, Mickey Mouse, Blabber Mouse, Pixie and Dixie and Jerry, as in Tom and… In every cat and mouse conflict I was set up to root for the rodent, and the pervasive image of the feline as less than felicitous has carried over into my adult life.

Unfortunately for the protagonist in this life or death drama, the same thing I like least about cats creates profound -- life-threateningly profound -- problems for mice.

In an inelegant phrase, cats poop in the house. Unless they're trained to flush or arrive properly Pampered, I don't care to have creatures around that poop in my house. Unfortunately for them, mice have exceptionally inappropriate bowel habits. They don't even use a mouse box. They leave it right there behind the Mr. Clean for God and anybody to see.

And me to clean up.

Now, I'll admit, my less than fanatically fastidious nature is pretty well documented, but a few dark brown pellets under the sink and few more under the stove is a pretty certain prelude to similar discoveries on the kitchen counter and itty-bitty footprints in the butter dish.

One doesn’t want to take chances with one’s wild rice or raisins…

So to deter the deposition of mouse turds in the Tupperware, it’s off  to the store for traps and D-Con by the case.

Personally, I think traps are more fun. I get out my buckskins and voyageur cap, have a shot of bad whiskey, bait 'em up with my special blend of peanut butter, Bac-O's and bad cheese, then run my trap line. It brings out the back woodsman in me, figuring out where a mouse would run, where a mouse would want to be. To catch a mouse you've got to think like a mouse ... and you've got to put the traps where the dog can't get them or risk very rude awakenings very late at night.

But being a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy, I back up my domestic trapline with poison. Silent and deadly it’s out of sight, out of mind, until I have to pull out the kitchen range to get to a little corpse that's quickly going very bad. There is a downside to everything…

So just after the sun set Saturday, I set out the last supper. Checking the little yellow box Sunday morning it was clear our uninvited guests would soon be visiting the Great Cheeseball in the Sky.

Sorry, Mickey. It's nothing personal.