So you know that one trap I mentioned which was snapped and had the bait removed? Remember how I said that it was cool if "one got away"? Well, the mouse did actually get away. In fact, he got about a foot and a half away before his partially smushed little head could lead him no further.

He expired behind some boxes next to where the traps are. By the time I found him, he was about 3" in diameter and sort of... "soupy" on the inside (part of him stuck to the concrete floor, and he leaked a little when I scraped him up). He smelled really nice, too. I'm thanking the maker for latex gloves and bleach.

Gonna need a whole extra mouse category at this rate...

I think I'm going to put more traps in the garage. The only activity was there. Just one customer today. And one trap that had the bait stolen from it -- except the trap was sprung. I can handle that. If they get away legitimately, then that's cool. I know where they live.

So we have mice in our house. We first noticed it when the cable TV got "weird". We could only get channels below 200-ish, and everything between like 75 and 200 was savaged by MPEG decoding errors (big blocks of color, odd sound). We had the cable guy out, and it happens that we were getting signal loss somewhere in between the jack in the garage where cable comes into the house and the TV in the family room. That's in the walls or the attic. And then we saw it: mouse poop in the garage.

The cable guy said that he was thinking mice when we told him of our symptoms. They apparently love to chew on insulation. So the little bastards have bitten through our cable wire somewhere inside a wall, and now I have to run a new line outside the house (I couldn't see any obvious breaks while I was in the attic). After more looking around the garage we found more mouse droppings, and a little quarter-sized hole chewed through the screen of the vent in the wall of the garage. So that's how they got in. Must have smelled Indy's dog food or something. She's been chasing something under our spa for a few months now. Maybe she scared one of them inside the house?

Sad part is that we found some droppings under the sink in the kitchen, too. They're getting in from where the drain goes into the wall. That cabinet unit has a large hole cut into the back for that drain. I'm really, really glad that we have those semi-custom cabinets. Each one is like its own little box, and they all get screwed together to make the whole kitchen setup. So the mice can't get into the rest of the cabinets, only the ones with the hole for the drain. So they've been going under the sink and getting into our garbage can for food. At least all our food and plates and whatnot have been safe.

We set out mouse traps under the kitchen sink and in the garage Monday night. We used peanut butter as a bait. I initially thought to use cheese, but as you can read in the horrific war story Harvey The Mouse Must Die, peanut butter is the bait of choice. We set 8 traps and got one mouse. But that is not even close to what you would call success. In fact it's downright pitiful. See, we also had 6 unsprung traps with the peanut butter eaten clean off them (one trap remained undisturbed). Eating the bait off a trap without springing it is Mouseese for giving us the finger. It's not at all like springing the trap and then eating the bait. That's pedestrian, average. We're clearly dealing with mice with attitude. Bait stealing is how mice laugh at you, see. They are laughing at us. Laughing, they are. And pooping all over the place. Yeah, we'll see who has the last laugh.

Last night we were casting about for a better bait, something that would ensure that the little catch holding the lever would spring the trap when they start mousing around. I figured some set of mesh/net, like maybe made out of nylon or something, that could both hook around the bait tray and also be embedded in peanut butter. Like a little piece of sponge. Or maybe something heavy, to better give the traps a hair trigger. I couldn't really find anything that fit the bill. We finally settled on actual cheese. (Tillamook cheddar, no less. Greetz to my Oregon homies!) Sometimes the obvious solution is the best one, right? I was skeptical.

Lo and behold, this morning has brought us three formerly alive rodents. As in dead. Not pinin', passed on. Those mice are no more. They've ceased to be. They've expired and gone to meet their maker. They are late mice. They're stiff, bereft of life, they rest in peace. If we hadn't snapped their tiny necks, they would be pushing up the daisies. Their metabolical processes are of interest only to historians. They've hopped the twig! Shuffled off their mortal coils! They've run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! They... are... EX-MICE!

So the score as of 9am is:

Mice:	6
Tessenwee:	4

But the simple number of dead mice vs. empty traps doesn't show the "real" score, as it has no rate information. It doesn't show progress. So I made a small graph, which better illustrates the success we've had in our struggle against the mouse:

As you can clearly see from the lines on the chart, we are winning the battle and I'm confident of our victory. Once I get my ladder back from Todd & Wy, I'm taking the fight into the attic. Into the very heart of the mouse. I will soon be able to once again count on one hand the mammals living under my roof.