The World According to "Aaarrgh!"

After I bought the mousetraps, my wife decided that she better be the one to set them.  After all, she explained, they really hurt if you get your thumb caught in one, and she had had that happen.  So, for the sake of my digits, I shouldn’t set the traps.  I gladly deferred to her wisdom. 

As irony would have it, no sooner had she explained to me how bad it hurts when you get your thumb “trapped”, the trap that she was setting accidentally discharged and trapped her thumb.  As her face turned different shades of colors, she was indeed showing me how much it hurt.  She has since deferred to me trap setting.  Better my thumb than hers.

We discovered that the previous owner left behind some “pets”.  More than one.  And these aren’t your typical timid mice.  These are bold mice.  These are mice that will run across the living room while you are sitting in it watching the telly.

So, we bought some traps.  We caught one, but we didn’t.  We caught its leg, and it proceeded to taunt us by scurrying across the floor with the trap still attached.  My wife was going to let it go in the yard, but when she released it, it scurried into the kitchen.  Taunting us!  After we reset that trap, the mice would make eye contact with us, and then scurry away where there wasn’t a trap!  More taunts! 

Eating my pudding, and having a mouse taunt me, was more than I could take.  It was time for action.  Even though the traps said not to use bait, I decided that desperate times call for desperate actions, and baited a trap with a smidge of peanut butter, set it down in the kitchen, and went back to my pudding eating and telly watching.  Not more than five minutes had passed when I heard, “Whap!”  I checked the trap, and had one the first battle.  Man 1, Mice 0.  I have since baited a second trap, and now the score is Man 2, Mice 0.

With all of the optimism of the move, there was one sad task we had to do — say goodbye to the pets.  When we moved into the house on the hill, there was a calico cat that was already there.  In the subsequent four years, she has had several litters, and her descendants occupied the barn.  We had grown attached to the cats, but couldn’t take them with us, because my daughter is allergic to cats, and they cannot be in the house.  Living on a small city lot, there was really no place for them outside, and since they were for the most part feral, we felt it better to leave them at the only home they ever knew.

As for our dogs, we took them to the shelter, and hopefully they will find a good home and family.  (A small city lot would not work for two big dogs that have been used to roaming the country.)  This is the first time in 17 years we are pet free, and while I am sad not to have my pets, it is rather liberating, not to mention cheaper.  Now we can travel without having to constantly worry about the care of pets.

The main reason why I was in such a hurry to move out of the house on the hill was that it had a flooding issue, which one would not expect from a house on a hill.  The problem was that the house wasn’t built on top of the hill, but rather a third of the way down.  So, when it rained, the water would come rushing down the hill into the house.  During really really heavy rains, the water would seep through the floor and flood the lower level.  The mud room was also constantly prone to flooding.  To add insult to injury, as a result of the ice storm last year the roof got damaged and sprung a leak.  The outlet pipe from the back patio didn’t drain well when we moved in, and was getting progressively worse, so bad that when it rained the patio would fill with water and the water would rush in under the back door.  The combination of all of these things overwhelmed us; it got to the point that we were afraid to leave the house if it was going to rain because we were the only defense to keep our stuff from getting damaged.

We didn’t realize the extent of the water damage until after we started moving stuff out.  We had to throw away some stuff, some of it irreplaceable, because it had gotten wet and moldy.  I felt like Captain Smith of the Titanic, abandoning ship as fast as I could.  Or in the case of the house we were living in, before another rainstorm hit.  We got out just in time, too, for the day after we had gotten the last load out, it rained very very hard.

So far so good in the new digs.  And the basement doesn’t flood, either.  It is nice to be able to relax and enjoy a rainstorm.