Me vs Mouse 2.0

We moved out of Mousetopia a few months ago. I left the little bastards behind to take over as they wished. Not my monkey, not my circus.

Except that apparently it is still my fucking problem.

Over Christmas we traveled back to our home town of Bigger-than-here to visit family and over-eat. We did both with success. The night before we left we performed what can only be called a Tetris miracle and packed up our van, planning to leave early the next morning. This all went as smoothly.

Tetris level: Master

The trip went as well as can be expected when travelling with a 5 year old, 1 year old, 2 adults, a cat, and a dog in a vehicle packed beyond its commonly achievable limits. No one died. I call that a win.

I’ll skip the basic getting there, unpacking, greetings, etc…no one actually wants to hear about that. Suffice to say, we made it, we survived, it was good. Nothing out of the ordinary.

And then dinner time came. Let the eating begin!

Following dinner, we pulled out the chocolate advent calendars. Normally these are the kid’s much-anticipated after dinner treat. Today, they were the harbinger of doom.

The 5 year old looked up at me and said that her chocolate for today was gone. I, being somewhat untrusting of a 5 year old’s chocolate driven motivations, pretty much assumed she had eaten it early. Taking a look at the calendar proved this was not the case….all of her chocolates were gone, and each little advent flap had been chewed open. She very well could have been responsible for the missing chocolates, but I gave her the benefit of the doubt that she hadn’t chewed through the cardboard to get at them.

One traumatized kindergartener later, we began to play Clue – The Stolen Chocolate edition. The first theory was the dog, in the backseat, with unsupervised time. This didn’t fit, as the dog wasn’t being punished for eating chocolate with the usual explosive vomiting and diarrhea that one usually sees when dogs and chocolate combine. Additionally, the calendar hadn’t been ripped to shreds as you would expect with a motivated dog with only minutes to accomplish his task. Not the dog.

This left only one real option. Not the kid, not the dog….a mouse? Fuck. Fuck, fuckity fuck fuck, dammit, fuck. I mean, um, darn?

No, I mean fuck. Sorry kids.

Unfortunately logic dictated that if the calendar in question had gone into the van unscathed, and emerged out of the van the next day a mere shadow of its former self, then the mouse had to have been in the van.  The kids went to bed, while I tried to get my repugnance under control.

That evening, rather than being spent in a pleasant haze of tipsy visiting, was spent relieving the van of its contents. And vacuuming. So much vacuuming.

This mousey visitor had left, roughly, all of the mouse shit. It had likely been in there for at least a week, living the high life eating toddler crumbs, as the baby seat was full of poo (and not the poo you would expect to find in a baby seat). There was also mouse crap in the glove box, the cup holders, the toy bag, and in all the little cracks of a car that have no official name but still, literally, collect shit.

The one that broke me, however, was the mouse poop in the overhead light fixture. You know, the one that you can’t actually get into to clean? Yeah, that one. I will forever have glowing mouse droppings illuminated in my ceiling whenever my van door is open. 

We cleaned for 2 hours. To be fair the van needed it anyway, but I would have rather done it on my own terms and not on day 1 of my vacation.  The van sparkled by the end, and there was no sign of a mouse still living there, but to be safe, we put a couple of traps in there anyway.

TWENTY @*#&%#$ MINUTES later. 

It only took 20 minutes to catch the son of a bitch mouse that had been in the van the ENTIRE TIME we were in there working (*skin crawls*).

I can’t even describe to you how much I hate mice at this point. Not in an “eek, scary!” kind of way, but in more of a raging, burning hatred-that-could-power-a-small-town kind of way. This whole experience was a special kind of hell. At least it didn't end well for him.