Building a better mousetrap....

Seriously, do we really need a better mousetrap? Somehow, I don't think anything beats the old reliable, sticky paper. I'd rather use sticky paper than conventional mousetraps, or even rat poison. You don't have to get rid of the dead rodent and reset the trap, or worry about pets and children eating the poisonous rat pellets. Just throw out the entire thing, trap and rat, and that's that.

While our house is for the most part, rodent-free, exposed sacks of rice stacked right on our pantry floor, or for that matter, any huge concentration of food seem to bring them out of the woodwork. Like in the movie Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come.

I hate mice. Oh, I can tolerate the critters running around the floor, but somehow it really gets my goat when I see various wires and cables of electronic equipment, make that expensive electronic equipment, full of bite marks from the little monsters. And the sensation of their teeny-weeny feet on your flesh is disgusting to say the least.

One of my more repulsive misadventures with these ghastly rodents occurred while toasting a sandwich in an oven toaster only last month. Less than a minute after I turned the thing on, I noticed smoke coming out of the toaster. This got my attention, for all I know it could be faulty wiring or something, making the appliance a potential fire hazard.

So I turn the thing off, open the oven door, and a singed and smoking rodent jumps on my shoulder, and onto the floor where it skittered away, no doubt with a heck of story to tell its brothers and sisters on how it had been to hell and back. Surprised, I let out a deep, manly grunt (not a girly shriek, mind you) which got the attention of the other people in the household, no doubt increasing my respectability and esteem in their eyes. Oh well.

And you wanna know what happened to the sandwich I was heating up? I hope you people don't think less of me for this, but I still ate it, after toasting it to a crisp first as a precaution. What can I say? That sandwich was just too damn perty to throw away. Fortunately, I haven't experienced any ill effects. It was almost a month ago, and I still feel healthy. :-)

What we really need is a cat. Preferably a good mouser. We used to have a cat, a huge tom at that. It never really caught that many mice, preferring to spend most of its days lying on its side, sleeping, warming up in the sun. I really envied that cat. I would leave home for work in the morning and I would see it lying on the driveway. When I got back several hours later, it would still be there. It's a good life. Above is a picture of that cat before he disappeared for good a few months ago. I always thought I'd be using this picture in a post eventually, well, here it is. Wherever he is, I hope he's in a better place.

Until we get another cat, I guess we're stuck (pardon the pun) with sticky paper to put the local mouse population in check. And I suppose it would be a good idea to check the oven toaster before I put any food in it in the future. :-)

I think I better go back to blogging about more cerebral topics. I think I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel with this post. :-)