Friday, July 31, 2009

Cartoon mice cute- real mice.... not so cute




You know the feeling. The phone rings at 3:50 and you hope the person in bed with you gets up and answers it.
A million thoughts run through your head. His mother, my mother one of the kids.
Then you remember you are the call number for the North Carolina Pottery Center, An alarm has gone off and they are dispatching a police car.
"Call me if anything is broken, I mumble....."
Then you hope to go quickly back to sleep.
It never happens.
The first few times the alarm went off I would dress, drive up there and go through the building with the police man. Now I realize it is usually mice.
We have had mice on many nights, or a real windy storm will set the alarm off.

I have lived in the country long enough to have enough mice stories to fill a book.
At times I think about writing one.
Me and the mouse, or mice as it happens to be.
There was the one who hit the mother load when he discovered the 50 kilo bag of dried garbanzo beans on the porch.
We found garbanzo's everywhere in the house he could stash them, in increments of three.
Three, six, nine and so forth.
We knew he had to go when we found them in the pocket of our jeans and our shoes.
That is just too friendly in my book.
There was another who decided to chow on the soap in my bathroom. Soap! Well, it was nice handmade soap. Must have been tasty because he kept coming back until one night when he fell into the toilet.
I woke to the splash and made Mark do the dirty deed of flushing him down.

Then there was the one who chewed up the fur on my winter coat to make a nest for her babies.
Cute you say... not so cute when little baby mice start darting out of the coat closet and you are thinking , "what the ...." then you find she has gotten into the tightly closed up garment bag and done in a winter coat several wool sweaters........again, not so cute.
Don't call PETA on me we did get rid of them.
So, Cartoon mice cute.
County mice, in my house.
Not so cute.
But wait !I have not even started on the snakes.......

8 comments:

Linda Starr said...

EEK - a mouse. We once found a mouse nest complete with babies in Gary's roll around tool chest in the middle drawer, we left them there till they were big enough to leave. That was the garage, in the house they'd have to relocated, but wait my cats would relocate them for sure.

Anonymous said...

you should write a book but inevitably peta would probably intervene. i have many mice stories too, a couple real winners, but when they start to multiply you always get to the point where it's either us or them. i actually got a pistol out once because of their defiant sassiness but it's too long a story to put in a comment.

Gary's third pottery blog said...

eeek, snakes?

cynthia said...

Cute and funny stories to read, but I wouldn't want them in my house.

I've seen them in my yard though - especially my compost bin. Back when we had cats, they took care of them, the dogs are merely curious and not very stealth.

Snakes - no thanks... I've had my fair share running into them up in the mountains.

cindy shake said...

Fine if they are OUTSIDE but inside they can be so destructive. We practically had CONDOS of them living in our garage last year -they ruined our expensive gear by peeing/pooping on our camping gear, ski bags, ate the inside of my ski helmet, even chewed through the hard plastic Eukunuba dog food container and the last straw was a dead one inside my snow boot (yes, I had slipped the boot on and found it that way!!) -arrrrggh. sorry PETA but we finally had to use glue traps :o(

Michael Mahan said...

When I lived in my Argosy travel trailer, I had mice. I found one inside a very nearly empty beer bottle. He didn't look well.
I took the bottle outside and had to shake him out. He stumbled away very slowly.

cookingwithgas said...

Thanks for sharing your mice "tails" with me!

Beth said...

I'm surprised the snakes you mention haven't kept the mice down. I used to live in a 100+ yr old farmhouse. Mice and chipmunks were a problem... until the black snakes moved into the walls. After that, the furry folk moved out.

Oh course, having a 6' snake drop out a break in the attic ceiling was a tad disconcerting, LOL.