Jeffrey

[rhienelleth]

There was some excitement in the Rhien household last night. First, we had a bug problem. The first thing I noticed after I got home were some strange tiny bugs on the wall behind our washing machine. Now, I keep a pretty clean laundry room, but what with the cat and dog being fed in there, and pieces of their food occasionally being lost forever under the dryer or washer, I guess it pays to pull those out of their spots from time to time and vacuum all that stuff up. Which I did, also vacuuming up the odd bugs *shudders*

Well, in the process of this, I found something else under our dryer:



Yes, a mouse. (Which I have dubbed 'Jeffrey' in my head, I'm not sure why.) Cute, but certainly completely unexpected. How did he get in? How long had he been there? For pete's sake, the laundry room is the cat's room. Why in the heck had Julius not taken care of this?

A little more investigation revealed that our dryer vent had come away from the wall, leaving a relatively HUGE hole to the outdoors behind out dryer. In hindsight, this could easily explain both the bugs and the (all right, so he's kinda cute) mouse.

Farm girl born and raised that I am, I was all for shutting the cat in there with the mouse and letting nature take its course. Mark, mighty hunter of elk and deer, wanted to catch it and let it go in the field behind our house. In his words, had it been a rat, he would happily have killed it, but the mouse was kinda cute, and terrified looking. (Especially once Julius finally noticed his existence.) So, Mark caught the mouse, I took this picture and my heart did soften a bit once I got a good look at the little guy, and then we let him go in the field behind our house and duct taped the dryer vent closed again.

Comments

[jimhines.livejournal.com]

He is a cute little guy, isn't he?

Our dryer vent actually got the duct tape treatment over the winter.

[rhienelleth.livejournal.com]

Mark was just going to stuff the hole with something until he could buy new vent pipe, or whatever that's called, and I was like "Um, no. I need my dryer. Duct tape!" It worked just fine. :D

[frenchroast.livejournal.com]

LOL, the "throw a cat at it" solution is exactly what I did when I found a mouse in my room a few years ago. I felt kind of bad when she caught it five minutes later, because it was kind of cute. But then I remember the 4 foot snake that crawled into the bathroom (there are few things more terrifying than walking past the bathroom and seeing a large snake just hanging out there), and decided if I had no qualms with killing that, then I shouldn't feel bad about a mouse, either.

But Jeffrey is cute.

[kistha.livejournal.com]

I'm kind of with Denis Leary most days "You only want to save the cute animals."

Still - glad Jeffery got to live. He belongs in the field. I'm all for relocating when possible.

[woodface]

While mice are cute, having them in your house is not so much. We ended up with mice here too. The house next doors was sold and the people are renovating. So the mice over there, went looking and ended up in our house... Eating from the bag of empty chips I'd left in my room.

Not so much fun, I tell you. You might want to make sure it's just the one mouse, though. Cause usually when you see *one*, it means there are a whole lot more.