Meese

There’s a mouse in my house. It was spotted yesterday evening three times, which means, on the plus side, it’s probably the first one that’s decided to hang out, or we would have seen it before. On the minus side, it also means it was probably stuck and didn’t know how to leave. I’ve had lots of run-ins with mice in my day, and they don’t overly upset me (I don’t get on a chair and holler when I see one for example), but they are mighty unsettling for such wee creatures. I really hate knowing they’re around, but not knowing exactly where. Sitting right above my shoulder? Under my chair? I ended up wandering around my apartment last night with a broom handle, banging on the floor to scare it off, and perhaps to accost the mouse with if it made an appearance. It reminded me of that scene in The Parent Trap where they convince evil step-mom to be that she has to bang sticks together to scare off the mountain lions.
In addition to random mouse sightings in every apartment I’ve ever lived in, except for my parents, my two, previous, intense mouse experiences are: 1) mouse crawled down my back. 2) Mouse crawled across my bed. The first was at summer camp in the “library,” which was just a place where we had sleep outs and watched videos on rainy days, and that had a serious infestation problem. Like when your bunk had to clean it for community chore there would inevitably be a sighting, a.k.a. an entire litter of mouselets whimpering in a garbage can. My bunk slept out there one night, and we were up to the regular 14-year old sleepover hijinks, running around, screeching, and a mouse ran down my back while I was sitting on the floor. An event that wasn’t as terrifying as it might sound, because it was dark and I didn’t know what was happening until it was over, at which point, it seemed kind of funny. Incident number two came in college, when I snuggled down in bed only to see a shadow dart across my pillow. I started screaming and all my roommates came into my room, and doubted me (!), until the mouse ran out from behind my radiator.
The moral of the story is that mice are not really scared of humans. But they are kind of cute, so it could be worse.