inspired by the beauty that is <"liz"/a> (i hope that link works), i think i'll write a short treatise on my feelings toward mice.

i fucking hate mice. they're nasty little balls of hantavirus waiting to happen, they eat anything and shit on anything, and i really hate to see them crawling out of various holes (keep your minds out of the gutter, loyal readers and perverts). in our apartment, though we aren't quite sure where the mice live, we do know that they have selected our gas stove and oven as their vacation palace. this might sound amusing, not to mention a problem easily solved, but neither is true. it's really unnerving to see a mouse crawl out of one of the openings around the burners, and only slightly less so to see one crawling in. as to the problem having an obvious solution, two problems there. one, i am incapable of killing anything larger than a mosquito. i don't know why. it is a longstanding compulsion, and i don't expect to ever get over it. second, it's hard to catch the little fuckers near the stove eyes, since when they see or hear me, they generally take off for the bottom of the stove, and even if they just sat there, i wouldn't go close enough to them to do the job, for obvious reasons, and if i got around every other complication, i couldn't handle seeing the dead mouse on the stove. finally, the oven.
our oven has not been used for baking or any other purposes since before i moved in over two years ago. "why ever so?" you might ask, after which i might punch you. then in answer to your silly victorian sounding query, i would explain that the current mouse problem is just one of many that we have had in this apartment over the years. it usually seems to be just one or two mice, but since all wild mice look pretty much the same, who really knows. there may be dozens queued up right now in the stove and oven waiting for a chance to steal some food, i don't know. anyway, the reason the oven hasn't been used is because many of the mice that lived there also died there. we have chanced to turn the oven on only twice in my two years, and in both instances the apartment was filled with a smell that can only be described as "the mummy's curse in missouri." this is because the mice that are dead within still linger on, in the warm dry environment that is our oven. undoubtably, there are little mouse shrines and sarcophogi entombed therein, not to mention the mice servants that were probably sealed up to serve their masters in the mouse after-world. in any case, i'll never know, because i'll never open the oven. i like to bake, but i hate corpses as much as i hate live mice, and that weighs heavier upon me than my desire for casseroles and cookies.

one last mouse story for those who aren't disgusted yet. about a month ago, a mouse became trapped in our kitchen sink. it was empty, and the walls to sheer for the little beast to climb. though he tried like a motherfucker, he would have starved there had we not intervened. i wanted th mouse out of the sink as fast as possible, but i neither wanted him in the house nor dead, so we had to come up with a catch and release plan. suzi put the cracker box in the sink sideways. after he raced into the relative safety it offered, i turned it top up. with two foot barbecue tongs, i carefully carried the box across the street to my neighbors yard, affectionately known as "that fucking jungle." no doubt the contractors working on the house attached to that fucking jungle were amused to see a grown man carrying a cracker box with barbecue tongs held at arms length, but i successfully released the little bastard. he ran happily off into the fucking jungle, no worse the wear, and i felt like a hero.

a note to liz (if she still sees my page at all): be glad it's mice. that means there are no rats. i don't know why, but i've been told they never occupy the same building.

i've got several ideas for better mousetraps, should anyone like to beat a path to my door.