I’d like to say I was one of those people whose car always smelled fresh off the lot and looks pristine, but I’m not. Probably I won’t be one of those people for several more years. Regardless, I do my best. A couple months back I did a thorough cleaning, vacuumed, washed the windows, the whole nine yards.
A couple days after doing this, I opened the glove box to find a horrible sticky mess. When I cleaned there were a couple ketchup packets and a sweet and sour sauce packet in the car and I had thrown them in the glove box to be used later. At first I thought they’d just leaked and I was annoyed at the mess, but when I picked up the sweet and sour sauce it looked like it had been opened with a can opener. What in the world!? I asked my son if he’d been playing with it and he said no. My next thought was what freaky bug was in my car! I cleaned up the mess but didn’t find the perpetrator.
About a week later we had grabbed fast food and unbeknownst to me one of the girls left the remains of their burger in the car. The next day I found crumbs scattered about and once again, wondered what in the world was in my car? I cleaned up the mess but found no more evidence of what was causing the issue. I was beginning to suspect a mouse. An investigation revealed nothing.
Finally, the next day a piece of paper that was in the car had been completely shredded and I knew it must be a mouse. A mouse? In my car?! WTH?!
I went to the store and grabbed a mouse trap. It had a plastic piece designed to look like an orange piece of cheese. I don’t know who the designers were, but I really think a mouse is going to know that just because it looks like cheese, doesn’t mean it IS cheese. Regardless, I smeared it with peanut butter, set it, and left it in my car.
The next day the trap remained perfectly intact except for one thing. It had been completely licked clean! There wasn’t any evidence it had previously been covered in peanut butter. Damn that smart mouse!
Frustrated, horrified, and worried it was going to start chewing on my wires, I went back to the store for a real mouse trap. All metal! I was about to leave for a business trip and I didn’t want the mouse traveling with me.
This time I baited not one, not two, but three mouse traps. Two of the old fashioned metal mouse traps were baited with some “stinky” cheese, a delicious herbed Swiss I’d picked up on a wine tour. Just for the heck of it, I also rebaited the plastic trap with the peanut butter.
When I left the house at 3 AM to drive to the airport, I crossed my fingers that the stupid thing had been caught. To my simultaneous pleasure and disgust, I caught it! If you’ve never seen a mouse caught in a trap before, let me tell you, its gross. At least this was because the bar came right down on its skull and its eyes were bugging out. Ew! However, let me tell you that mouse was smart. It had once again licked off half the peanut butter. My guess was it was midlick when it got a whiff of the cheese and decided to check it out.
Yay the mouse was dead! I’ve lived here for nearly a decade and never seen a mouse before. I hope to never see one again. Just in case, however, I decided to get a cat. She’s about four months old. She’s an indoor/outdoor cat, litter box trained and an already experienced mouser. Right now, she’s pouncing on my keyboard. Maybe she’s a writer in disguise?
