One down…
… how many left?!
Hopefully not many! I am anxious to get our food back in the Lazy Susans!
Data isn’t doing much for catching the mice, but he does let us know when they’re in the traps! (And tell us that is why he needs to be on the counters – to sniff them out.)
Side story: we originally had a quote in our FHA 203k work to build out a laundry room/pantry on the first floor. The kitchen doesn’t have much for food storage – two Lazy Susans, an odd can storage system, and the microwave shelf that I am using for storage.
I didn’t think that would be enough for my food hoarder ways! I was used to a closet for all my food, and dreamed of a walk-in closet with shelves. And thought it would be nice to have laundry on the main floor.
Then it had to be nixed from the budget. Darn. Then we found out we put aside way more money for close than we’d need and might be able to build it! Then we set up the office (where we were going to take space to build it) and decided we liked all that office space. Then we spent all the extra money (on many house things, including a water treatment system I still need to post about). So, yeah.
Back to using those Lazy Susans. I think they’re annoying (all that spinning to find my food – wah!) but… it does seem to be enough storage space. So I was wrong! As much as I’d love my walk-in food hoarder closet, this will work for now. It has to. Ha.
Funny what you think you’ll HAVE to change in a house, then you find out what you can live with and what you really need to change (the water, ha ha).
Back to the mouse!
So we found mouse droppings and a chewed off corner of a bag of tortillas last Wednesday. We took all the food out of the Lazy Susans and put it in grocery bags on the kitchen table. Then Friday night, I actually SAW a mouse run across our kitchen counter. Um, no gracias. We put all the food in plastic bins with lids that night. And went to look for no kill traps and didn’t see any. Steven was telling our old neighbor, Troy, about it the next day, and he had some live traps we could use. Yay! We set them up Sunday night and got our first guest at 12:30 am this morning. I was up for some reason and heard the mouse go in the trap. Data did too, and ran downstairs, all excited. Ha ha ha.
We’ll release the mouse in to the beautiful countryside… far from our house. I feel bad dislocating him from his family! (I am not even joking – I really feel bad about these things – better than death though.) If we find more family members, we’ll make sure to take them to the same place!
Themocracy
Must be the time of year, we’ve had a few visitors in the past week too – same subspecies as your little visitor actually. They come in the house during the winter. We used to do live traps but one of my cats has a really high prey drive and the mice never made it into the livetraps…he catches them and puts them in my bathtub where they can’t get out. He used to catch and kill them but I trained him to leave them for me in the tub so I can trap and release – I feel bad too but I figure at least they came in my house where they get the chance to be released :/ Although, Elliott killed the last one and I broke down crying in my living room because I didn’t get there in time to get the mouse from him. I used to breed fancy mice so I am super super sensitive about it! 🙁
Wow! That is cool you used to breed them! What are fancy mice?! They look a certain way? Pure breeds?!
And I am impressed you trained the cat not to kill them! I am okay with the circle of live and wouldn’t mind Data killing them and cleaning it up. Sigh. It seems he just wants to play though.
Mice bred for show! I bred Siamese primarily (so pointed with dark nose/ears/tail like cats) but had curly mice as well. It’s been a while though, I couldn’t devote enough attention once I had kids sadly.
It doesn’t always work. If he ate them I would be okay – my first cat Isis used to kill to eat – but Elliott plays too 🙁 I can’t tolerate it. It took a while because he likes to torture the poor things, but usually he will just bring them to the tub now for me to trap/release. The one he caught the other day though he bit badly, I think by accident. I felt so terrible. I get killing to eat. Cats are obligate carnivores and mice are a normal source of prey. But catching just to torment, for hours? Noooooo, please no 🙁 Not when he gets the same enjoyment out of batting a crinkle ball around!
http://mouserydatabase.com/mousery.cfm?mousery=2
^ Some of my old mice, long since passed away sadly.
Aww, they are cute!!! Did they like to be held and stuff? Were they completely domesticated? Thanks for sending the pics!
Yeah… either kill or let it be. Don’t torture it!!!!
Oh yes 🙂 Mice make great pets. Boys have to be housed alone because they are territorial – they will fight each other to the death, at least for domestic mice. (I’m not sure about field mice, I know there are some species that live just fine with other males.) But the females live in colonies and the males alone, and they lovvvve people when you socialize them. Very sweet and love cuddling. I really miss them but I couldn’t give them the right attention with kids, and I was very worried the kids would hurt them too because mice are small.
Aww, they sound like a lot of fun! The gals, anyway. Ha!
I think the boys actually were more affectionate because other than an occasional breeding tank tryst, you’re their only companion. But they do mark their territory so get a little stinky if you slip on cage cleaning 😛
We had a little mouse problem before we moved out of our old place. What’s funny is the first thing it ate was part of an avocado and all I thought to myself was “weird, why did I buy an avocado with a hole in it?” But then there was a hole in our bread bag and I was looking at it one morning and all of the sudden it occurred to me that it was a mouse! In the end, I think we had 10 of them total! Eek!
Funny that they went for an avocado! They got to our bread, too, later last week. We left it out – we’d rather have them eat what they started they go through other stuff.
I am happy you were able to get rid of them. I won’t ask how 😉
I was actually thinking that mouse looks so cute in the first picture! I’d feel really bad killing them (apparently Data does too?), so I’m glad you’re going to let it roam the countryside!
My parents have 2 Lazy Susans in their kitchen – you can fit A LOT there!
He was so cute! And was scared this morning when I released him. Poor guy! I hope he likes the country fields :-/
You can fit a lot! I just find them kind of annoying! I am sure I will get used to them soon though 🙂
As kids, my brother and I liked spinning them as fast as we could. Which caused stuff to fly off LOL. So that could be annoying 🙂
Yeah! And they knock over and it gets jammed, wah wah wah, life so hard so much food… 😉
I remember messing around with someone’s lazy susan like that as a kid. Whose was it?! Ha ha, can’t remember.
I understand about the storage space. I remember when I first moved out of my home when I was getting a divorce. I was moving into a house with more sq ft total but the kitchen was less than appealing. No room and a missing pantry! I made it work and actually wasn’t as bad as I thought. haha!! It is amazing how much room you think you need vs what actually works!
Mice!! EEK! Nope, no thank you! Had them at my old farmhouse for a couple of minutes. I was so happy when we had them out!
Yeah! I thought the house looked really small (but big enough) when we were looking at it to buy, and now it feels plenty big!
Aww… the mouse actually looks cute in that photo. Not cute enough to keep around though. I love the look on Data’s face in that second photo.
He was actually really cute!!!!!
LOL, Data. So fierce 🙂
its very cute and Data’s face even cuter. The can storage thing looks like its awkward to use but lots of space. Any excitement with the flying squirrels lately? 🙂
You got it – awkward but lots of space!
Our roofers saw them going in and out of the attic while working on it. And they got in to the space above the living room on Friday night. EEK! None other than that. We need to figure out how to get them out before we have the attic insulation redone.
My parents had to deal with that in Massachusetts. Our back yard was all woods, so the mice would find a way into the house during the cold months. Hudson’s a Hemingway cat and proved their mouser reputation is no joke. He’s a very good mouser.
That is good Hudson could help!! 🙂
The house we stayed in for vacation last summer had a full height pantry that worked the same way as your can storage shelves. I thought it was pretty cool.
My inlaws put a bunch of plastic reusable water bottles in their Lazy Susan…which of course meant they all fell over all the time and jammed the thing. I grew up with those cabinets and now I don’t have one and I actually find it irritating to have to crawl into the back of the corner cabinet to find stuff! Ah, first world problems.
Oh interesting! And you could still reach the top of it?
Ha ha ha – yes, I had to learn what needs to be propped up and what can stand on it’s own! We do have one deep cabinet that baking stuff/etc we don’t use in that often is in and it’s a total PITA to get the stuff out of the back… just like at the townhome, ha!
Yeah! The top shelf wasn’t really that high. I thought it was a good way to maximize storage space without needing to have a super deep closet-type pantry.
We used to get mice in our freshman dorm and they freaked us out. We never set traps, but a couple died of “natural” causes. One we were able to trap in a box and while running down the hall with the house in the box, it must have gotten too stressed and died before we made it outside. Another time I woke up in the morning and found a dead mouse on top of my backpack.
But in our senior apartment we saw mice and did set up a kill trap and caught a mouse in it 🙁 And the two of us who came home to the mouse were too freaked to do anything so we waited for another roommate to get home and she dealt with it.
And now I live on the 3rd floor of a condo building made of concrete (converted warehouse). My only pest is Olive.
Oh creepy! I hope they took care of that! All that money we spend for board and sleeping with mice. LOL.
I wouldn’t want to deal with one in a kill trap, either. Ugh. It would just make me feel horrible!
I had them in my rental house in South Carolina. At first I was wondering how the bag of tortillas had a hole in them- roaches with steel teeth? And then I wondered how piles of dog food ended up in weird places like in a drawer or in a pair of shoes in the laundry room. And then one morning I saw a dead mouse in the dogs water bowl- it had drowned. Luckily we were moving soon so we didn’t have to do anything to get rid of them. But I could hear them in the walls and would find them in the water bowls from time to time. The dogs would also go crazy if they were roaming around. Good luck! I’d guess for every one you see there’s at least 7 you don’t see 😉 you need to get Data on board with scaring them off 🙂
Oh yuck that it drowned!!!! I bet the dogs were going nuts!!!
Steven keeps saying “maybe that was the only one!” Ha, ha, I wish! There have got to be more!
I have to laugh about the “food hoarder” thing. As our house was built in 1965 we still have the original cabinet configuration (just updated the finishing when we moved in) with a limited “pantry” cabinet. So I took over part of the larger cabinet space and Matt calls it my “hoarder pantry” LOL!!!!! And it totally **IS**!! It’s all the stuff not currently in rotation or extras or bulk or *whatever*. It’s “organized” only well enough for me to find stuff but he generally won’t look in. “Where’s X?” “In the hoarder pantry” “OK well then you’re going to need to get it out” HAHAHA
OMG, are we the same person?! I was in charge of organization of the pantry at the old place, and always knew what was in there. MUAH HA HA. I am happy you found a place to hoard away!!!
Oh no! I think I would cry if I saw a mouse running around my house (Didn’t mean to rhyme..or maybe I did). But he/she IS kind of cute! That pic of Data is ridic. I’m dreaming of a walk-in pantry too. Some day, friend, some day!
Ha! I like the rhyme 🙂
We want to reno the entire kitchen in 10 years. Definitely then!
Maybe the mouse you caught and released was ready for a change of venue and appreciates the opportunity to reinvent himself with a new social group away from your house.
I was thinking about your food hoarder ways and giggled thinking about the number of cans of beans you had in your house one time.
LOL! I hope so! We haven’t had any mice since, surprisingly!
HA! How many was it? 10? More? I would believe it. And you won’t believe this – last week we actually couldn’t make refried beans because we had no pinto beans in the house!