Meeses

Yesterday morning as I ate breakfast and checked the 'net, I thought I heard something odd. An animal scratching at the door, maybe? I stood up and got closer to the door, but the sound stopped. In fact, every time I heard it, I would get up and walk toward it, only to have it completely stop. I figured it was a bird or something getting into the attic. Just another thing to worry about.

Later that evening, hubby-Eric and I sat down to watch Corpse Bride for the first time, and shortly after the movie started I heard the sound again. I got up to investigate, and Eric said, "You hear it too? I was hearing it this morning." We checked, but couldn't find the source of the sound.

A bit later, I heard it again, and so I got up stealthily while the movie was still playing and looked around. Suddenly I heard the noise, very clearly. It was coming from one of the buckets we use as a recycling bin, right by the back door. My mouth went dry, and I turned on the light... snuck up on the bucket, and looked.

I wasn't sure what I saw, and I babbled something to Eric about turning off the movie and checking this. He came over and looked too... It was hard to be sure, but it appeared to be a mouse. He moved the bucket, and the creature attempted again, as it had apparently been doing all day, to jump out of the bucket. Definitely a mouse.

A moment of debate later, we decided that we didn't care if it lived or died, we just wanted it out of the house. Eric opened the door and kicked the ... um... bucket out into the yard. He said that he thought he saw the mouse go flying. He was about to bring the bucket back in, but I convinced him to leave it out, and we finished watching the movie.

Presuming the neighborhood catwatch wasn't on patrol in our back yard, I'm going to presume the little guy made it out alive. Much better than us finding him dead in the bucket from sheer exhaustion and starvation.

But of course, that leads us back to the problem of how he got into the house in the first place. Very probably via that hole in the side of the house that I still haven't had a chance to get repaired. While it's covered with plywood, it looks like a critter could easily come up from the crawlspace into the house through the interior hole. Unfortunately, we just got an estimate on how much it will cost to fix the gutter and the wall... and it looks like we're going to sink into debt yet again. But if we've got little critters wandering around, I don't think we have much choice.

At least the movie was pretty good.