eek!
For those of you who know me in real life and come to our home sometimes, you might want to skip over this post, or at least consider yourself warned...
I went to bed last night feeling so accomplished - finally, I had gotten the house cleaned from top to bottom and all the laundry almost finished. Wow! It felt so good, after seemingly being behind on these things for a few weeks. How nice to wake up to a clean house this morning... er, at least I thought it was clean.
Mid-morning, I called my husband just to chat for a few moments while I was cleaning the kitchen up. While talking with him, I noticed something under our dining room table and went to investigate (thinking it was some spilled food or something). All of a sudden my husband hears me let out a shriek...
There was a mouse - a DEAD mouse - lying under my dining room table. Eeeek!
It took me a few moments to process it. How would a mouse not only make it into our house but then lay there and die right. under. my. dining. room. table?
My husband couldn't believe his ears when I told him this. He asked me a few times, "Are you sure it is a mouse? Are you sure it is dead?"
Yep, I wasn't hallucinating.
Bless his heart, my husband drove home from work right away to not only rid our home of the mouse and disinfect the area, but also to investigate all the surrounding area to make sure there weren't anymore. I told him repeatedly that I'd do it myself, but he didn't want me to have to mess with it. Aren't I spoiled?
So much for the clean house. I've spent most of today re-cleaning. It's probably pointless, but at least it makes me feel like I'm doing something to proectively guard against more creaturely intrusions!
I went to bed last night feeling so accomplished - finally, I had gotten the house cleaned from top to bottom and all the laundry almost finished. Wow! It felt so good, after seemingly being behind on these things for a few weeks. How nice to wake up to a clean house this morning... er, at least I thought it was clean.
Mid-morning, I called my husband just to chat for a few moments while I was cleaning the kitchen up. While talking with him, I noticed something under our dining room table and went to investigate (thinking it was some spilled food or something). All of a sudden my husband hears me let out a shriek...
There was a mouse - a DEAD mouse - lying under my dining room table. Eeeek!
It took me a few moments to process it. How would a mouse not only make it into our house but then lay there and die right. under. my. dining. room. table?
My husband couldn't believe his ears when I told him this. He asked me a few times, "Are you sure it is a mouse? Are you sure it is dead?"
Yep, I wasn't hallucinating.
Bless his heart, my husband drove home from work right away to not only rid our home of the mouse and disinfect the area, but also to investigate all the surrounding area to make sure there weren't anymore. I told him repeatedly that I'd do it myself, but he didn't want me to have to mess with it. Aren't I spoiled?
So much for the clean house. I've spent most of today re-cleaning. It's probably pointless, but at least it makes me feel like I'm doing something to proectively guard against more creaturely intrusions!
posted by Crystal Paine at 2:16 PM
33 Comments:
I assume you live in the city, but here in the county it is prime mouse time! People are mowing down the fields for winter and the temperature has dropped so mice are looking for a new home. Thank goodness We have a good cat that keeps our home mouse free.
Crystal, you are so funny. I would have been the same way, except I would have MADE my hubby come home and remove it b/c I'd be having a stroke in the mean time. I am so afriad of rodents. But I doesn't mean you have a dirty house. It was probably cold and looking for a warm cozy place to kick the bucket.
Wow that is so awful! How nice of your husband to drive home to help you with it though! At least you found it and not Kathrynne!!!!!
Sissies!!! You all are so funny, I could really make you queasy with some of my stories, but I won't go there. Anyway, mice are cute. =D
P.S. No, I am not a tomboy.
OOOh, I hate, hate, hate mice! So much! Once my husband was gone for the entire day, and one came shooting into the bathroom WHILE I was in there, and I left the house for the rest of the day, because I couldn't cope with knowing that there was a mouse in our house!!!
I truly believe that mice are only cute in cartoons and children's books....
I am so sorry that you had a mouse in your house. On the plus side, he was not alive!
In our first married home, and apartment, we had mouse trouble for a while, and it was horrible to find droppings and see something dash across the floor! We put down the sticky traps as we had one that was too smart and would eat the peanut butter out of the trap without setting it off, and when we caught a mouse during the night I was too afraid to even go out of bed as back up....I kid you not. Oh, and when they say that those traps are reusable??? Not in our house.....
Kristy
I was hosting a date night for young married couples in my church last year. While we are all playing games and eating, a friend of mine said Chrissy did you see that. I said what she said it was a dark objest jet in your kitchen. I said hmmm. We continued to play and fellowship then our little friend came to visit. Well, we all ran around the house. The women on the couches and men chasing it. It was funny! We caught it and well I will not proceed to discuss the rest. But I was humilated. I am known as Mrs. Squeaky Clean. But corn and hay was being cut across the road. I am blaming it on that. It is a good laugh now.
Chrissy
That is too funny Crystal! Hmmm, something to be thankful for in this crisis?????....Kathryne DIDN'T pick it up and eat it!!!! HA!!!!!
Remember I told you last year about when we moved to Minnesota and we had the mouse infestation in that yucky old rental we were in??? YIKES. We also had FLEAS too. I don't think we used so much bleach and vinegar since.
Cheers for Jesse. Your a good man Jesse Brown! (You know - like Charlie Brown)
P.S. Are you ever going to call me or e-mail me and ask me where we are moving???? Aren't you even curious?????? :-)
Cheryl: I would have but right when I was going to, Lauren emailed with all the details. :) You can still call me, though! :) I figured you were probably swamped, too, since Lauren said you were moving in just a few days. I wondered what happened to you though since I'd not heard from you for a few weeks. I was going to call you on Sunday and couldn't find your phone number. Yeah, I'm hopelessly disorganized about people's phone numbers and addresses.
I think mice are cute sometimes - but they are most positively NOT cute in my house. :)
Wow, I really wanted to just keep on reading your lovely blog, but honey, your font is so tiny it hurt my eyes to try to read it. Add to that the notoriously eyestraining combo of black font on white background and that makes it really hard.
Blessings
We'd gone to bed one night and heard a nibble nibble coming from another room. We tippy toed and zoned in on the sound(in the piano!). Gasp!, piddle and droppings were on the keyboard under the cover. Brave me(haha) started playing to have the itty bitty mouse zoom out from beneath the pedals, across the room, and under the sofa. Hubby went for the broom and began smacking all around the sofa while I thought, "My hero!(go easy on the furni!)". ;-) No movement so I picked up the sofa skirt to see 2 beady eyes looking at my wide peepers as the scared little thing was hanging on to a leg for dear life. Across the room it darted with broom hubby in close pursuit, down the stairs and probably out to the garage to exit as it had entered with the next opening of the outside door(I'm on the sofa at this point). Only mouse in that house near farms in over 20 years.
Here(more city) we were overrun with mice that found their way in the garage when the youngin was working on his car(cold fall day). Now how did they find that grass seed to sustain them until they made way to the house(flung the bag of seed to the driveway when I saw mice were in it one day; hope no one saw and heard that!)? We longed to see the end of those shadows streaking across the floor(and arrrggggh, droppings in the back of kitchen drawers and even a bit of cork flooring in a bedroom gnawed for a closet escape. scrub vacuum scrub vacuum scrub vacuum). Those sticky traps work(best with peanut butter added) but they can be drug across the floor and the critter struggles till expiring(that takes way too long so they need "helped"). To the "scared kittens here", I've been the only one here to do that, too(arrrgggghhh). lol
Loving the mice stories, ladies! I'd venture to say these have all been classy mice that like homes with gals like us making things nice and clean for them. :-)
Shannon: Sorry about the font size! You can actually fix it on your end, though. Just go click on "view" and then on "text size" click "increase" until you get it to the size you want it.
Oh and sorry for the black font on white - that's just my style. :)
I'm actually hoping to have my blog redone to be a full page and three columns in the not-too-distant future but I'm still researching that out. It's not exactly how I want it now (will it ever be?!) and I've had some sidebar difficulties, especially since my HTML knowlege is rather limited, but it at least works decently most of the time.
It's just not at all my major priority right now.
Oh and I think my sidebar is stilled messed up in IE - I can't seem to figure out how to fix it.
I feel very safe with a cat in the house, especially a cat who loves to hunt mice.
Crystal, I feel your pain:). Last week, we had not one, but TWO chipmunks get in. Catching them is next to impossible, but...thank the Lord for their God-given instincts. In the afternoon when it was quiet, one came upstairs and made it over to the slider, which was open. I was able to just let it out. The other one did the same thing later. They weren't interested in staying at all!! I was pretty thankful that they didn't want to investigate the bedrooms!!
Glad your mouse story is a "done" event!
Crystal, do you want your blog to have 3 columns like this?
http://practicewriter.com/vu/?C1C0
Joyce: That's actually how it is supposed to look and does look (as far as I know) in Firefox. Internet Explorer has been giving me fits with the sidebar, though. It often shows up at the bottom of the page, for some reason unbeknownst to me. Ugh. I basically never use IE, but it seems a ton of my readers still do, so I need to have it looking correctly there as well.
I'm looking to go to a widened blog with three columns - like La Shawn Barber (http://lashawnbarber.com/) for example. My web designers are great and do excellent work when it comes to web design, but they are not too familiar with blogs. I'm thinking I need to hire someone to redo my blog who specifically deals with blog design. However, I don't have the time to mess with the challenges of getting it changed right now so I've decided to be content for awhile. And, I'm still trying to figure out what I want exactly!
I know that currently your blog is 760 for the width and the other site has the header at 965 only I'm not that good with all the percentages and numbering to adjust your page. :-( I think the folks that designed your page would have no problem doing that. I'm just not sure how to make sure I catch all the places that need adjusted.
For now, to get your page to have three columns, it is very simple. The picture and web address being side by side for crafty garden is what is throwing it off. You can either compare the view source notepad for what is currently on your site and add the breaks < br > that I put where the sidebar information begins OR you can go to the bottom of the page(the link I gave for the 3 column page) and click to edit this document and copy and paste the entire code from there in place of what you have now and save it in that notepad document. Did I totally confuse you? ;-)
Got it, thanks Joyce. I hadn't even checked my blog in IE for months or I would have caught that right off. (People have just been mentioning it is messed up and I've been meaning to get around to checking it and fixing it!) I get so busy with life that I'm doing good to post on my blog, let alone check it in any other browser besides Firefox.
The break is not necessary in Firefox. See, like I've been telling you all for months, you all really ought to get out of the Dark Ages and switch to Firefox. It would make things so much easier for me!! I rarely ever have blog problems with Firefox. IE has been a huge pain!
You're welcome! :-) Oh, I emailed you after first posting here. In case that message doesn't make it through, if those in IE switch their view text size to largest, it will still throw the right sidebar to the bottom. In that case it is the blue text for the blogs being posted and some of the blue text size that will adjust in your right sidebar. Correcting that flies right over my head. :-)
I know many of the computer guru folks on eBay browse with Firefox and Opera but there are still a fair amount of websites out there that are marked as coded to be optimally viewable in IE so I've not switched. I know there are differences with web designs that don't read the same if viewed in other than IE(think simple code for background color is something that isn't a recognized code). I first browsed with Netscape. :-)
Your mouse story is so farmiliar!
We have a very, very lazy Ragdoll cat. One night about a week after we finished unpacking after our last Navy move we heard Wazzu, the cat, racing all over the house. We were too tired to get up and see what was going on so we just let him go wild. If you know anything about Ragdoll cats you know that they rarely do anything, much less race back and forth around the house.
The next morning I found what had him in an uproar. There was a little dead gray mouse placed for us on the middle of the fire place. Luckily we had spent a few months at my in-laws in the country while waiting to close on our house - I was plenty used to mice!
My oldest son (8) picked it up by the tail and tossed it for me. He is such the little man - he wouldn't hear of my doing it myself!
By the way, I use IE and your blog looks fine to me.
I have a story worse than that,from yesterday. I had my friend over for lunch, and she found a FLY in her soup. Awful. (shudder). I was soooo redfaced.
Luckily she is laid back and not squeamish...and she loves me, so she won't hold it against me.
Mary
This is way off topic, but Crystal, increasing text size in IE increases the size of the fonts in the right and left hand columns, but the middle column stays the same regardless. :)
But I like the black on white!! Waybetter than neon like some people have ;)
Crystal,
We have fields across from us and every year we get at least one mouse. Just when we think they are gone and bleach everything, we find evidence of another one. My mother in law found a great solution that has repelled them so far. We bought peppermint oil at a health food store. It has to be oil, not the extract. Soak a cotton ball with it and place it where you have seen evidence of mice. Mice don't like the smell of peppermint. I've heard fabric softener works for this as well but I haven't tried it yet.
Tammy, if you scroll a little to the frugal friday posts, the text size will change there in IE for the links to the blogs. It seems some text size is fixed with the code and others are variable(didn't figure out how to deal with that).
Crystal, your page will view differently depending on the screen resolution settings on individual computers. With IE set at medium text size, at 800x600, your page widens to fill the screen and needs a little horizontal scrolling to view the entire page. With 1024x768, there is a right and left margin. For those with wider screens and settings, the margin would increase. Some folks code with percentages rather than fixed page width to avoid that while others believe the fixed is best. There are websites that provide varied browser views and screen resolutions to folks wanting to see how their website looks to others(browsercam.com is one example). You don't have to post this message. :-)
Hehehe...this shouldn't be funny, but it is! We live in the country, so mice are a fact of life. And toads. And salamanders. And chipmunks.
My dad works out of the house, and he says every once and a while he feels something "staring" at him. He'll turn around, and there will be a toad or a salamander just chillin' on the floor of his office, watching him. And the best part is, my parents two big bad doggies are scared of these critters! ;) Don't worry...mice happen anywhere. We know you're a good housekeeper. The mousie was just cold.
When we lived in Mississippi we had mice all of the time.I really hated taking out the dead ones when my husband wa snot home.I do not miss the house we had there at all.
Crystal,
A mouse is nothing. Try walking into your pantry and seeing a very alive snake coiled on your window sill. He was looking out the window like a cat.
I screamed (very loud) and fled the room. We had a lot of snakes around the house this year. My sister had it worse. She had so many (big females) that she started shooting them with a pellet gun. She killed quite a bit of them. Now she has mice (can't win), but she just got herself two cats. Now she has a stinky litter box. lol!
We have a few mice who sneek around the kitchen and scare me in the middle of the night, but we have a dirt basement and lots of ways for them to come in. Why is it that they wait until you are close to them to make their presence known. It is like they get a kick out of me screaming my brains out. They always run in front of me at the last minute. Kind of like squirls across the street.
Mice have always been a problem for us.
I have tried snap traps, glue traps, and humane traps. The first two are gross and messy, with the third you are stuck with a LIVE mouse and have to figure out what to do with it. (release it outside, hoping it will not find it's way back or kill it yourself, defeating to point of the "humane trap?")
I finally found the "Rat Zapper," it kills the mouse instantly with no mess.
It is a little pricey, but the only thing I have ever found that really works.
Last week my oldest son got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the nght. He came across a SNAKE. Upon relating what he did next I quote,"I got my pocket knife, killed it, went to the bathroom, and went back to bed." No screaming, no trouble going back to sleep, just happy to have a pocket knife handy....Not the way his mother would have responded!
Laurie F.
Get a Cat!!
Dccdmom: I most certainly would, if I weren't terribly allergic to them! Growing up, we always had lots of outside cats and as long as I didn't touch them, I was usually okay. For some reason, after I moved away from my parent's home, I became much more allergic to them. I'm not exactly sure why, but I doubt we'll ever be able to have cats ever unless somethng radically changes. Oh well!
Yuck...reminds me of when I was living in the women's dorm at Bible college and got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. Well, wasn't I surprised to see a dead mouse laying on the toilet paper dispenser of the stall I was going to enter. I looked in the rest of the stalls, and there was a mouse in each one, so it was obviously a prank. Eww.
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