Designer Mice

Did I mention I had a house mouse? It hoarded granola bars. It was a sneaky mouse. 

This is the one year anniversary of the discovery.

  

According to the lovely free on-line dictionary, Wikipedia, The house mouse is a small rodent, a mouse, one of the most numerous species of the genus Mus.
As a wild animal the house mouse mainly lives associated with humans, causing damage to crops and stored food. The house mouse has been domesticated as the pet or fancy mouse. 

Luckily for me, my fancy mouse liked to live alone behind the grate under my new LG fridge.  It made a nice home in between the compressor and the ice cube filter hose, after chewing through the power cord.

Flashback to 10/2009:
In a panic I called Kate asking her if she could drop by my house because my outlet was dead as I walked into worked with a reusable shopping bag full of food.  I had checked all of my breakers and it was the only thing that made sense.  When I checked in with her later on, she saved what she could and told she saw some granola bars that fell behind the fridge and some mouse poop.  Then she added that she had pulled out 21 granola bars from behind the metal grate.  Each of the granola bars had 1 bite out of them, with one corner torn off.

So much for going grocery shopping the night before and now I had to worry about vermin.

I know how to problem solve and the outlet wasn't dead.  Coco and the Abbycat were going nuts sniffing the fridge and the cubby where the fridge was.  I didn't see anymore mouse poop, I sprayed it down with another layer of Clorox, was armed with my Sargent Steamer, and had 4 mouse traps set.  The pets were also guarding the fridge and dishwasher. 

Two weeks passed and nothing happened- I even went to a specialized farmer/rancher store to get big mouse/rat traps.  I knew it wasn't a rat- the droppings were small that I had found.  The cat and the dog didn't change places either- they guarded the fridge as if it were full of gold! I didn't hear the mouse and didn't see the mouse.


Four weeks passed and I found Pink Panther insulation on the floor.  I didn't know if Coco had gotten into something of if the mouse was living under the dishwasher.  
TIP: When you can't pull out the dishwasher it's because a) it's jammed or b) the people who lived in your house before you tiled it in so you have to pull up the floor to get it out. 

It was 8:30pm on the following Thursday night when I arrived home from math class and heard a screeching, eeeeking, god-awful sound inside my house as I'm unlocking my door.  Mind you, I have no children living at my house.  As I walked inside, my hall light is burned out and the shrill sound was growing louder and as I feel around for the nearest light switch. I finally looked down stairs.  Abbycat was playing with the damn house mouse!

Good Kitty

 

 

The mystery was solved.

The house mouse was so massive, it didn't fit in the mouse traps which is why they were never set off.  The granola bar stash finally made sense and it was probably snacking on some dog food.  Due to the fact that I had sent Coco to my dad's house, there wasn't any dog food and the mouse was hungry and was going for the cat food down stairs.  Abby was having the time of her life, I was trying to find something to trap the mouse, when Abby looked up and the mouse took off.  I heard it scurry upstairs and I watched it high-tail it out the dog door and it was gone!  

I'm happy to report that we did NOT find any mummified mice during the cleaning process.  It was also 34 degrees in the house the following week- the thermal coupler in the furnace broke.