Ok, let me preface this with the fact that I am not a big fan of spiders, snakes, and rodents, so needless to say while I may have been the one who discovered the Christmas mouse, I was not the one to deal with it.

Let me set the stage for you. Last night, Royal went to bed at 9:00 like he usually does, since he has to get up at 5, and I stayed downstairs and watched TV to try and put off going to sleep since going to sleep only makes tomorrow come faster and that means I have to work. So, I was laying on couch under a flannel blanket, all the lights were off, the fire was on because I was freezing and Royal wasn’t awake to complain about how warm it was downstairs, and I was watching a not so interesting episode of CSI-Miami. Then out of the corner of my eye, I see a shadow run along the wall behind my head. I thought, “hmm, how odd, wonder what the heck that was”. Thinking nothing of it, I continue watching TV. Then I start hearing some noises, it kind-of sounded like when a fly gets stuck in your lamp and keeps running itself into the light bulb. Kind of a tinking and buzzing and scratching sound. Knowing that there were no lights on and the sound was coming from behind my head, I keep looking up the wall and the ceiling looking for some poor bug that was going to probably perish that night, that I would most likely leave for Royal to get later. ha ha ha. Well, I can’t see any bug and I keep hearing that noise, so I mute the TV so I can concentrate on where the noise is really coming from. I mean I don’t want some bug dive-bombing me or anything. And as soon as I mute the TV, the sound stops. I mute and unmute the TV to test it a few times and the sound always stops when the TV was muted, so come to the conclusion it must be the TV, although the thought of that shadow I saw is in the back of my mind. So, I’m still laying on the couch under my blanket, flipping through some channels hoping to find a movie, when all of the sudden out of nowhere, something jumps on my shoulder, it’s not a dive-bombing bug, it’s a freaking shadow with a tail. I, of course, bolt upright and let out a small screech and am thinking, “oh my gosh, there is a mouse on this couch with me.” I jump off the couch, hitting all the light switches on the way, I mean I don’t want this thing sneaking up on me again, and I run upstairs to the bedroom all the while yelling, “Royal, Royal, get up!!!” I bust open the door and where is Royal? Still sleeping, not hearing anything that is going on. So I go over to him saying, “Royal, wake up, there is a mouse downstairs and it jumped on me” He of course keeps sleeping. So I start shaking him saying, “Royal! Take out your gosh darn earplugs! Wake up! There is a freaking mouse and you have got to come get it!” He of course is a little groggy since it is now 10:30 and he’s been sleeping for and hour and a half. He’s like ‘There is no mouse’. And me, almost hysterical is like “YES THERE IS!! IT JUMPED ON MY SHOULDER!!” So huffing and puffing and glaring at me the whole time, he gets out of bed and starts heading downstairs. I follow, trying to tell him the whole story of what happened, so he understands that there is no way he is going back to bed until that mouse is taken care of.

So, now downstairs and pissed about having been woke up for a mouse he hasn’t even seen yet, Royal says, “We’ll go get some poison tomorrow, everything will be fine” and he starts going back upstairs. I’m like, “hold it right there buck-o. First of all, I don’t want to poison the poor mouse, I want you to catch it and let it go outside. And second of all, I work from home and I do not want to be looking over for my shoulder for a mouse creeping up on me all day. So, we are taking care of this tonite” I really should not have said “we” because what I meant was I would watch Royal catch and release our new-found house animal. So pissed (remember he’s still tired and walking around in some boxers and a t-shirt), Royal puts on his tennis-shoes (I’m sure because he didn’t want some mouse running across bare feet), he grabs the stick that is our security for our sliding glass door, opens the door (I’m sure he did this thinking he could coax the mouse out of the door, yea right, outside is cold, inside warm and I’m sure the mouse had a little nest somewhere). I climb up on a chair, sitting on the armrest, ready to jump if the mouse comes anywhere near me. I tell Royal where I was when the mouse jumped on me, and Royal starts clearing off the couch. All the pillows and blankets are off the couch and still no mouse. Then I see my green knitting bag sitting on the floor next to it and am like, “Uh, Royal, you’re gonna need to go through that”. So, after a quick glare in my direction, he picks up the bag, and guess what happens! The freaking mouse goes screaming across the room and then back under the couch. I scream, which ends up distracting Royal and he never sees the mouse. He is like “What are you screaming about?” And I said, “The mouse!! Didn’t you see it???” So, Royal still an unbeliever that there is really a mouse, starts chucking things in my direction to clear out the room. He moves all the tables and flips the couch over. If anybody at that time took a glance through our windows (since we have no blinds yet, it’s like we live in a fishbowl), they may have thought there was some sort of domestic dispute. I mean, there was screaming, a girl crouched in a ball, a big guy in his underwear with a stick, and furniture flipped over. Royal is like, “Rachel there is no mouse.” I was like, “Check the panty in the kitchen, it totally could of squeezed under the door.” So, Royal heads over to the pantry with his stick and opens the door and I climb up on the kitchen counter to observe. He starts banging the stick on the stuff on the floor, and finally the little mouse comes sprinting out of there and right towards Royal. This is the part where we discover, Royal too is a little jumpy when there are mice around. I’m just grateful I’m up on the counter, but Royal is right in the line of fire. As the mouse is running towards him, there is no screaming from Royal, but he does pull off the staggered, double knee lift jump. I of course start cracking up and the mouse b-lines it for another closet, this time, the under the stair storage. So, Royal, excited that now we know for sure where the mouse is, sends me off to find something to capture it in, he was getting angry I wasn’t helping much. So, I find a couple of boxes and a towel to block the space between the door and the wall, and I set the boxes on their sides with the opening facing into the closet, hoping the mouse will run into them. Royal climbs into the closet and starts clearing out stuff we had in there. In the process we discover where the little mouse’s nest was, luckily it was pretty small, so obviously the mouse had just moved in. We get everything out of the closet, except a small bookshelf that has a bunch of stuff on it. Royal comes out of the closet and starts moving the bookshelf, hoping to scare the mouse from under it. Well of course it works, but the poor mouse is trapped and starts running circles around the closet and then heads for the boxes. It gets in one of the boxes and Royal not thinking clearly doesn’t flip the box up on it’s end to trap it in the box, starts saying, I need something to cover the box with. I’m like, “Get it! get it!, it’s totally in the box.” Well, both of us were too slow and we obviously underestimated the athletic ability of this mouse, because this mouse backs up, runs straight for the boxes, and jumps over the top of it, runs back under the couch and then we lost track of it, but had an idea that it might be in the laundry room. I just couldn’t believe it jumped over the boxes, I mean I don’t know why I was surprised, the mouse did jump from the floor onto my shoulder while I was on the couch. So, Royal heads towards the laundry room, determined to at least get it into the garage. Royal spends about 15 min trying to find it, banging the washer and dryer around, but no luck, we couldn’t find the mouse. By this time, we had been fighting the mouse for almost an hour and Royal was like, “I’m sure it’s in there”, so we closed the door and shoved a towel under the door to keep it from coming under the door and went up to bed. I was a little panicy, knowing the mouse was still in the house and I was going to be alone with it all day. But I end up going to sleep anyway.

OK, so now it is the next morning (today). I hear Royal get up and get ready to leave. Then I hear Royal downstairs talking to someone (or something) and then I hear Royal coming back up the stairs. He’s like, “The mouse is gone.” I’m like, “you caught it and got it outside?” He’s like, “Nope, I killed it.” I start getting angry because I didn’t want to kill the little guy, I had actually started coming up with names for it (Chester, Mighty-Mouse, Spidey-Mouse for it’s jumping ability, etc…), I just wanted to get it out of the house, so I’m like “What?? You killed it???” And Royal is all, “Well it was a bit of an accident.” Turns out, Royal was getting his lunch out of the fridge and when he opened the door, the mouse came running out from under the fridge and ran under the stove. So, Royal went over to the stove and started pulling the stove out from the wall and heard a squeaking. Turns out, he squished it. So, now there is no mouse in our house, but I am sad because the poor little guy died. Royal threw it out into our backyard, which is more like a gravel pit, but I may try and find it and bury it. I don’t want some stray cat running off with our poor little mouse….