Intruder

This is from a while ago but Charles reminded me that I never blogged about it, and I think it is blog worthy, FOR SURE. Here is another reason why being married to Charles Himmer is full of excitement and surprises.

When we got home from our Christmas trip to Texas, we discovered that we'd had an intruder in our house while we were gone. This pest had gotten into our newly opened 20 lb bag of rice. He had left little pellets all around our house, including Abigail's crib. We were at least happy at the size of the pellets. We could tell, it couldn't be bigger than a mouse.

First of all, what the CRAP was that mouse doing in Abigail's crib? And second... was it really necessary to leave droppings there? That just ticked me off.... And made me nervous to let Abigail ever sleep in her crib again. But we have gotten over that now.

Anyway, we heard the little creature up in our attic every night as we were putting Abigail down for the night. We heard him scratching around above our heads while we tried to go to sleep. Charles informed me that there was "No way" he was sticking his head up there to get him.

One night, we were up a little later than normal, and had left a cookie sheet out on the counter (no cookies on it, we never leave cookies on a cookie sheet, just for pest control reasons of course). I heard a sudden clanking in the kitchen and alerted Charles. He s l o w l y walked down the long hallway to the kitchen, with MY shoe in his hand. What he was planning on doing with that, I'm not totally sure. When he peeked his head around the corner of the kitchen, the mouse shuffled again, and sent Charles running back down the hall, with a, "Holy Crap!"

Me: "What? Did he come after you or something?"-- This was my logical deduction from his reaction. It must be a rabid mouse.

Charles: "No, it just made a sound."

haha... The next day Charles created this contraption.




That's right. Your standard- toilet paper tube, with peanut butter and cheese in it. As the mouse goes after the cheese, it is sure to tip the tube, and thanks to our friend, gravity, the mouse will be trapped in the trash can, atop a chair.

Charles actually unrolled the toilet paper from that roll so that he could do this.

He brought me in to show me and declared with confidence, "I bet we'll have us a mouse within a couple of hours."

Two nights later, for our date night we went and bought rat poison.

And that was the end of that.