Mr. Mousie's Bad Day

We haven't even put the house on the market yet, and already we have a family trying to move in! Or rather, they think they have moved in, and we are gently convincing them otherwise.

To be quite plain, we have mice in our basement.

We thought it was just one. We only discovered him yesterday morning. We have been living in the basement all winter, believe me, we would have known about mice if they had been there before.

Anyway, after numerous attempts to catch the mouse by placing a plastic basket over it, one of which resulted in poor Mr. Mousie bumping his head on the door in his flight, I finally caught him in the bathroom. He has looking a little dozy already, which is probably why i was able to get him.

There I was, plastic basket over mouse, yelling at my dad to get a big piece of paper or something to slide under the basket so I could flip it over and take the mouse outside. He brought me a file folder, which was nice and big and sturdy, but perhaps too big. I managed to smush mousie's wee footie under the basket and got a "weeeweeeeweeeeweee" for my efforts, and then after all that, the mouse slipped out, falling half a foot to the floor when i tried to flip the container over.

But he was stunned enough that my dad was able to scoop him into the gargage can, which we then placed on its side on the front porch, and then realized that it was raining and no mouse was going to leave a garbage can in favour of the rainy outside world. So I gently tossed the contents of the garbage can out, aiming for the garden, and missed.

Poor mousie landed on his back on the concrete porch.

As we watched, he slowly started waving his feet around in a definite "Whoa man.... Wha happened?...." kind of motion. He righted himself and started to slowly hop around the porch, very disorientedly. When he started aiming for the house, dad scooped him up in a little box and put him out in a flower bed that is as far as you can get away from the house.

Coming in from our ordeal, we started back down the basement stairs and saw another mouse!

After consulting with my aunt who lives out in the country, we put some birdseed in the bottom of a bucket as our new, humane, trap. Dad decided our mice were stupid though, and build them a little ramp so that they could actually get up to the edge of the bucket.

We have caught two more so far, one of which is in the photo above, so cute and little!  just not in my house!

I am not sleeping in the basement anymore.