Cool Hand Luke

A little over a week ago, Brandy and I moved into a new house. The morning after our first night there, I was getting ready for work and I saw something move in the living room. I saw a little, slithery something that had to be either a mouse’s tail or a snake. Fortunately, it was not a snake because I just couldn’t have handled that. (I’ve hated snakes ever since I was a kid when I found one wrapped around the neck of my teddy bear in my bedroom.)  It was a mouse. I woke up Brandy, calmly warning her that I saw a mouse. I didn’t want to upset her; I just needed to let her know the situation.

Just then, the mouse ran towards me, and I screamed effeminately . I jumped in the air and the frightened mouse darted past me and into our bedroom. At this point Brandy stood on the bed and screamed, too. That scared the poor mouse back out of the bedroom, past me (I was still screaming), and into our utility closet.   We think this may be where the mouse entered the house because there is a small opening in the back of the closet that leads to the bathroom pipes and scary, dark stuff. We shoved an obnoxious amount of towels under the door so the mouse wouldn’t come out. After that I regained my composure and told Brandy I was okay. Then I saw something move and I screamed again. Yeah, it was definitely my shadow. I’m not joking.

That evening I took a look in the closet and saw no sign of the mouse. I shoved a bunch of stuff in front of the opening and made it pretty tight, so that hopefully no more mice would come in. But the next morning there were droppings (to put it nicely) all over our kitchen stove. I knew we would have to get some traps. Then it snowed. It snowed relentlessly for an entire day and night. Our driveway and street were solid ice covered with snow covered with more ice. We weren’t able to get traps.

The next night, Brandy and I watched a movie. When it was over we fell asleep on the couch. In the middle of the night, Brandy woke me up because she heard something. Once I was awake I heard it, too. We heard what sounded like someone rambling around in the kitchen. Then it hit me—it was the mouse.

Brandy stayed on the couch, and I tip-toed toward the kitchen to investigate. Before I reached the kitchen, I realized the sound was coming from a cabinet in our living room. At our old house, we had no space in our kitchen so we had to buy a cabinet to keep our food in. Since we just moved in, the cabinet was in our living room, and it still had food in it. I could see the doors were closed, so I assumed the mouse must be on the outside trying to get in.

I grabbed a flashlight and tip-toed to the back side, expecting to see a mouse chewing on the cabinet. Brandy was laughing at me the whole time because I tried to walk really slowly but the hardwood floors kept creaking and I didn’t want to scare off the mouse. I shined the light on all four sides of the cabinet and I didn’t see anything. I could still hear it, though. I got closer to it and saw that the door was ajar just an inch or so. The mouse was inside the cabinet with our food. Great.

We didn’t know what to do. We didn’t have any traps. I am completely inept when it comes to catching mice with my bare hands. We didn’t want that thing loose in our house, so we did the only thing we knew to do. We shut the door and put heavy boxes all around it so that there was no way that mouse could get out. It wasn’t much of a plan.

For the next two nights, we could hear our mouse chewing all night long. In the morning there would be a pile of cheap, particle board sawdust on the floor beneath the doors—but no hole or any sign that the mouse had escaped. On the third night, we decided to do something about our problem. At this point, we were starting to feel sorry for the little guy/ freaked out that we had a mouse locked in our cabinet. Besides that, I wanted chips and salsa and I couldn’t open the cabinet to get them.

We tossed ideas around about what would be the best way to get the mouse out of the cabinet without just letting it run free in our house. We decided that we would have to actually take the whole cabinet outside. The two obstacles with that were: 1. the snow 2. the size of the cabinet vs. the size of my little wife and me.

I cut up a bunch of cardboard boxes and lay them flat over the two inches of ice on our front porch. After barring the doors of the cabinet shut with a paint stir, Brandy and I scooted the cabinet toward the front door. It looked like a huge, white, blocky monster hobbling through our living room. When we got to the door, we had to lift it up over the door seal and down a step to get it onto the cardboard, but we couldn’t both fit through the door with the cabinet. So, I (being the slightly stronger member of Team Nicks) had to manhandle the cabinet and fumble blindly out the door with it. When I put my foot down on the cardboard, it took off like a sled and I almost fell and mashed Brandy against the door frame. I danced awkwardly on our front porch for a few seconds trying to regain my footing. Then it was down to the nitty-gritty.

Slowly and reluctantly, I slid the paint stir out of the door handles and opened the door of the cabinet. Brandy cowered behind me with a flash light and looked over my shoulder and I stood as far off to the side as I could. I guess we were expecting the mouse to just come flying out of there like a rabid dog waiting to destroy us. But nothing happened.

After our adrenaline and fear leveled out, we realized we would have to coax out our furry foe. We could tell which shelf the mouse was on because, well, there were some distinguishing signs. We began to remove food items one at a time, still expecting a giant claw to grab one of our wrists or something like that. After we moved a few things, Brandy saw the poor, little guy hiding in the back. It was a tiny, black mouse with a long nose. We took everything out until it had nothing to hide behind and then it just started running back and forth. I was not about to pick that thing up. It ran to the edge a few times and looked over then ran back and flitted around along the back side of the shelf. Finally, we got it to jump out into the snow, and it bolted toward the front door. Fortunately, we had the forethought to close it. It tried to go back in the cabinet again, but Brandy scared it off. After a ridiculously long time of mouse running back and forth between the front door and the cabinet, our little varmint ran off the porch and into the yard along the side of the house.

It took us an hour to get the cabinet back in and clean out the shelves. We threw all of the food out. Evidently the mouse had been living on a steady diet of tortilla chips (yes, the ones that I was craving) and year-old Oreos. I have decided to count it all as a blessing because all of our junk food that we probably shouldn’t eat anyway was in that cabinet. Now we don’t have to feel guilty about eating junk food or letting food that we paid for sit on a shelf.

Epilogue:  We have since bought two mouse traps and caught two mice in the first night. There are still mice. Today we called pest control.