PETA Man of the Year

This story might cause you to stand on your chair and peel your skin off with your bare hands. You've been warned.

Our ant battles have been well-documented. Our recent mouse battles have also been documented. This morning, they converged in a bizarre case of Guantanamo Bay-style torture coexisting with the ethical treatment of rodents.

We have been big proponents of using Terro, the ant bait. It's sticky, gooey stuff, but it works and it's supposed to wipe out the colony and it's non-toxic to animals (except ants) and people.

So the latest ant invasion has been lapping up the Terro for a couple of days, with noticeable reduction in their armies. Great. A little bit of the Terro solution spilled on the floor near the trash can, and I left it there because the ants started gobbling it up. All the better. Eat it and die, you little shits. We don't have pets and the kids don't eat off the floor anymore. Once the ants are gone, it cleans up easily with hot water and soap. (This is obviously not the first time I've spilled it).

This morning, I went to dump my coffee grounds in the garbage can, and noticed a furry brown oblong thing in the spilled Terro. Hmmmm. I looked more closely. It was a mouse. And it was twitching.

"AAaaaaaahhhhh!" I said, backed up quickly, threw the coffee filter on the counter and got the hell out of there. G., who had already been up an hour and failed to notice the twitching, furry brown thing in the corner, said, "OK, take the boys in the family room and I'll deal with it."

That was the end of my involvement in the situation. The rest is told to me by G. because I sure as hell had nothing to do with it. I may never go near that corner again, we'll see.

So G. assessed the situation and sees that Mousey is alive, but stuck on his side in the spilled Terro. He got a piece of cardboard and a cup. He put the cup over the mouse and slid the cardboard underneath it. That's how he got the mouse unstuck.

He took the mouse outside, but Mousey's side was all gooey and sticky. It occured to me while I was waiting in the family room, "He's not going to try to wash it and set it free, is he? Nawww."

I, once again, underestimated him.

G. got a shoe box to put Mousey in, but Mousey was so sticky and gooey that he actually stuck to the cup even after the cardboard was removed, sort of hanging out the bottom, so G. couldn't get him in the shoe box. He wasn't going to use his hands (thank god). So G. got a pail of water and dunked the cup in several times to try to wash him off. ( BTW, G. does a really good imitation of the mouse getting dunked over and over, shaking himself off with this expression like, "Woah. This day's going from bad to worse." Ask him to do it for you sometime).

G. got him washed off enough to get him in the cardboard box, and then announced he was embarking on a relocation program in the neighbor's yard down by the railroad tracks.

So he gets in the car, taking Mousey in the shoe box, and takes him down to the railroad tracks and sets him free. (Note to self: Find out what he did with the shoe box).

Then he came home and said, "Poor little guy. I don't know if he's gonna make it. He was still pretty gooey."

And that's why my husband deserves the PETA Man of the Year award. I'm not sure what I would have done if I'd been alone (and I hope I never have to find out), but I believe it would have involved a shovel, mouse murder (mouseicide?), and lots of screaming.