AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

A while back I wrote about the uninvited guest to our house.  It was a rat that ended up dying outside of our front steps.  I don't believe he ever made it into the actual house  because he was too busy hoarding poisonous dog food in the garage.  Lesson kids: Greediness just MIGHT kill you.  At the very least it can ruin the global economy.

After the rat died, I put the notion of pests out of my mind and began to focus once again on trying not to throw up while stuffing my face with crackers every five minutes.  And then there came the lovely Saturday evening when Jeremy and I were watching The New World.  We had paused the movie so he could take the dogs outside and I was left alone in the dimly lit basement lying on the down feather bed on the floor with a blanket.  I thought I saw something streak past me and looked around for a spider near my covers.  I didn't find anything so I attributed the streak to my visual "floaters" and residual tracers from the good 'ol days.  I laid back down  and snuggled into the feather bed thinking what a hot John Smith Colin Farrel made when I noticed something in my immediate field of vision.  

Sitting on top of the covers on top of my stomach, looking right at me was the smallest, cutest mouse I have ever seen.  Under normal circumstances I would at least have flinched but his adorableness had a paralyzing effect on me and all I could manage was a weak Awwwwwwwwwww.  And then he darted away under the chair.  I ran outside to tell Jeremy about the mouse and when he came inside the hunt began.  We managed to catch it a couple of times but he jumped what would be like the equivalent of the rodent version of the Sears Tower to escape each time.  Finally we caught him in a box and tried to figure out what to do with him.  

He was obviously not full grown and we felt very bad about putting it outside to be killed by a cat or an owl.  So what brilliant idea did I come up with?  I decided we should keep it an make it our pet.  I would love him and pet him and squeeze him and name him George.  And because Jeremy is sometimes as insane as me, he agreed.  I'm telling you, the powers that this mouse held with it's cuteness were unshakable.  I rushed over to Petsmart to get a tiny cage for this mouse whose young life we had so benevolently spared and we put him in his new home.  Most people would have taken the fact that the mouse escaped from that cage several times in the first ten minutes as a deterrent from keeping him.  Us?  Nah, our solution was to just duct tape the hell out of the cage and wait till morning.

Well, morning came and with it came the revelation that we had one very good escape mouse on our hands.  It took me sicking Fairway on the trail of Baby Mouse as Ellie named him to find him.  NEVER underestimate a Pomeranian with only one eye.  Jeremy caught him again under the bookcase and this time we put him outside, with only minor feelings of regret.  He was mostly forgotten about and we got Ellie a Chinese Dwarf Hamster that kind of resembles a mouse to fill the void in her tiny heart left by the abandonment of Baby Mouse.  It worked and she named him Toodles.  And then we came home from the store one afternoon and she ran over to the window lifted the curtain and exclaimed, Toodles!  

OH GREAT, I thought, another escape artist!  But when I went upstairs to check his cage, Toodles was there fast asleep.  He is one lazy bastard.  When Jeremy came home a little while later we were talking in the front room and I happened to look down at the floor.  Just what do you think I saw?  BABY MOUSE!  Not even batting a tiny eyelash at his ballsiness of coming out in broad daylight.  And then I noticed that he had left some mouse droppings under the desk, and that's about the point that my inner Queen of Hearts reared her scepter of death and decreed, "OFF WITH HIS HEAD!"  When that failed to get the reaction I desired, I switched to Mr. Burns and said in my most sinister voice, "release the hounds".  

The hounds chased that mouse down to the laundry room in the basement where we almost caught it right before he made a flying leap into a small space behind the drywall.  "Well, he's in the walls now, Jeremy said, we'll just have to wait for him to come back out.  I'm sure he will." That was about a week ago.  On Friday I went to the basement to do some laundry when I was overcome by a putrid smell.  I thought maybe it was just Jeremy's socks and then I realized that it was coming from in the wall and that it smelled just like the time my hamster got lost under the sink when I was eight.  Sometimes it really stinks that scent is the closest sense tied to memory.  Poor Hammy, there was nothing left but some fur and tiny bones when we finally found her.

When Jeremy got home I took him to the basement where he accused me of creating that smell.  In a very unladylike way.  I told him that if I were going to lure him into a cloud of flatulence, I would certainly wait until he was asleep and then hold his head under the covers.  Thank you, Urban Dictionary, for teaching me some awesome tricks.  After some inspection of the basement, Dr. Sherlock Hayes informed me that he had deduced that Baby Mouse had made his way as far into the wall as the circuit breaker box where he was then electrocuted and is now stuck and obviously decomposing.  I asked Jeremy of there was anything we could do to get it out.  He replied that if we had a tiny camera, some fiber optic cable, and a set of pincers he could perhaps rig something to tunnel inside the wall.  I informed Macgyver/Bill Nye that that would be impossible and wasn't there anything else?   Well, outside of punching a hole in the wall, he told me, there really isn't anything we can do other than wait.  

So Dear Readers, we have been waiting.  Every day I think the smell can't get much worse, and every day the smell proves me wrong.  I have tried lighting candles, matches, and covering my face with a mask; nothing works.  This is my punishment for showing mercy to a living creature and sparing it's tiny life when everyone else yelled, KILL IT!  In the end it died anyway didn't it?  As an aside, this is just how much I love the show The Office.  I braved five straight hours of smelling a decaying mouse corpse merely feet away from my nose to catch up on season three.  THAT IS HARDCORE.  And the fact that I'm pregnant means I have the nose of a bloodhound.  

So if you think you had a bad day, just remind yourself that Jillian has a dead mouse in her wall right next to a vent and that means that the smell is being carried throughout her house.  Do you feel better now?  Good.