So.
It’s been a while.
How’ve you been? What’s new? What’s happening?
As the kids like to say, what’s goin’ down?
Or do the kids not say that anymore? I wouldn’t know. I’ve been here on my couch, buried underneath piles of paper and empty Starbucks coffee cups singing old hymns when I’m not rocking back and forth with a vacant look in my eyes.
Oh I’m being dramatic.
Truth be told, I finished the edits in plenty of time last week and decided to take a couple of days to regain some semblance of mental health. Even though I was sorely tempted to blog on Wednesday because you’ll never believe what happened.
We had a mouse in our house.
It was like God was testing me to see if I was serious about not posting on the blog.
P and I were watching T.V. late one night and all of a sudden we both thought we saw something move near our hallway. But it’s all dark and shadowy there and it was hard to tell for sure. P jumped up and turned on lights in the rooms off the hall and did a search to see if he could see a mouse or a roach or a hobbit that had made its way into our home.
He instructed me to stand at the hallway entry and be ready in case something scurried out. He also told me not to scream if it ran out because Caroline was sleeping.
Hi. Have we met? In what universe am I not going to scream if that happens?
But I tried to play it cool. He finished his search, kicked a few things to see if he could scare something out of hiding and then we decided we must have imagined it. Maybe it was just a shadow from the reflection of a car driving by or maybe it was the ghost of Christmas Past. Whatever. Just a long as I could convince myself it was anything less frightening than a rodent.
Plus, I reminded myself that P has a rich history of imagining he’s seen something. Over the almost fifteen years we’ve been married, he’s woken me up to ask if I can see the blue iguana hanging over our bed or the ninja standing by his nightstand or the squirrel running across our bedroom. I used to jump up in a panic because BLUE IGUANA! but I eventually realized that he just has very active dreams and a tendency to talk in his sleep.
Anyway, we went with denial and mutually agreed it was just in our minds. But P decided to set a mouse trap in the hallway just in case. Because like the old saying goes, better safe than infested with mice.
Then P went to bed. But I stayed up because I still needed to wind down and read Twitter updates and look at pretty fabric on the internet. I was engrossed in all this activity when I either saw or heard something, it’s hard to know which, and looked up in time to see what was undoubtably a little mouse running from the kitchen back into the hallway.
Which means it had already run from the hallway back into the kitchen at some point when I wasn’t paying attention.
Which means I kind of wanted to die inside.
I sat frozen on the couch. Not sure what to do, waiting on the sound of the mouse trap to snap. But that sound never came. And I did not, in the words of Buford T. Justice, care to be in HOT PURSUIT of a mouse.
So I just sat and tried not to think about it.
Then, just as the voices inside my head quit screaming, the little mouse came flying back through the hallway on his way back to the vicinity of the kitchen.
What is happening? Is this an episode of Tom and Jerry? Why is this mouse so active? Did he find a bunch of Sudafed in the guest bathroom?
I had no idea what to do and knew it wouldn’t do any good to wake P up because he’d just tell me to go to bed and that the mouse would still be there in the morning.
Yes. That’s the problem.
So I went to bed and rolled a towel to fit under the crack in our bedroom door in what I’m sure was an extremely effective and highly scientific mouse prevention technique. No way is a mouse going to break through a Disney Princess beach towel.
(Unless it’s Mickey. He’s always been bitter about the Disney Princesses.)
The next morning P and I whispered to each other about the mouse because in no universe did I want Caroline to be aware of our rodent issue. I told P about the mouse’s nighttime exploits and his possible addiction to amphetamines.
And so the next night, P came armed for battle. He brought a multitude of mouse traps and a bag of Starbursts because everyone knows the mice are crazy for them. Not to mention that it takes some dedication to get a Starburst out of a trap, guaranteeing almost certain death.
Sure enough, by the following morning the little mouse was no longer with us. God rest his little hyped up soul.
He met his end in the laundry room, with the mouse trap, and the Starburst.
Sadly, he didn’t fold any of my laundry before he died.