Of Mice and Men (is that a trite title yet?)

I have a mouse in my house…or perhaps mice. Whatever the case may be, it’s not exactly an ideal situation.

I live in student housing provided by my graduate school and we all share a kitchen (which is complicated enough in its own right, plus I keep kosher). This mouse either has a fancy for whatever it is I buy in particular or just found a hole right near my kitchen supplies. I have baking stuff (really just holdovers from my old place until I move out) and spices in my cabinets. Last weekend, the mouse helped itself to a piece of a Ghirardelli chocolate baking bar and a few other small things and didn’t bother cleaning up after itself. So it was up to me on ours (mine and R’s) anniversary weekend to wipe down the spices, disinfect the cabinet and put everything back in order. The exterminator came and put traps down, so I thought the ordeal was over.

I was wrong. Imagine my surprise this morning when I wake up. I’m supposed to be observing teaching at school, so I’m up early, ready to go, then look outside and see…SNOW!! Glorious, class-canceling snow! I tell myself I’ll straighten up a bit, then head downstairs to do some programming (I’m in a plant bioinformatics rotation now…comment if you’d like to hear more about it ;-) ) until the driveway is plowed (it’s a steep hill, not one I’ll be attempting in the snow). Wonderful! I’ll be productive and get stuff done.

Then I get downstairs and open the cabinet, and see chocolate powder all over everything, including the spices in the adjacent cabinet.

Round 2. It’s on mouse and this time Ima take you down! Or, you know, clean up after you.

I take stock of the damage first, and notice that the mouse has chewed through the lid to my Ghirardelli’s Natural Cocoa (another holdover for baking…word to the wise, when they say Dutch processed coca, this is not a good substitute without some tweaking) and gotten into a bag of shredded coconut. Enterprising little fella. And unlike last time, where all I had to go by was mouse droppings to figure out where the mouse had been, this time, there were chocolate footprints. The mouse had been kind enough to leave a trail, which was great because I knew exactly what to clean to prevent R and me from getting the dreaded “Mouse Poop Disease”. That is a clinical definition.

After wiping down everything and setting aside all the spices and other items that had gnaw marks on them but the package wasn’t broken—which were wiped down anyway but needed new spice jars—I took a deep breath and at 11 AM headed down my freshly plowed driveway and started my day.

At school, we had a lecture from a biotech company before I headed off to my lab and I told everyone who would listen that I had sworn vendetta on the mouse. How dare it come into my food and eat it!? Certainly, such a dastardly act is deserving of some sort of capital punishment. I would give it to a cancer lab and have it infected with tumors! It could donate its body to science! Unwillingly! To make up for its trespasses!

I can be dramatic sometimes.

Then the silly thought occurred to me that the mouse maybe ate a total of $10 worth of food. Is that worth killing it over? Is it worth killing anything over? If it gets trapped, that’s one thing, but outright killing? Perhaps not. Ah well, no lying in wait for the little rodent, then scrambling around trying to catch it. I guess I’m a softie. And very much a bioinformaticist.

(Side note: if you do want to catch a mouse, one my labmates tells me that peanut butter chocolate Clif bars are like crack to mice. He put down one and caught two mice in 20 minutes.)

Everything else is great around here. R and I celebrated our first anniversary in style by seeing Chicago on Broadway and then going out to eat. Her present floored me, and continues to floor me. When I move out of student housing, ask me to show you the present, and I’ll drag out an orange 6 ¾ quart Dutch oven. That baby’s gonna last forever. And so will we.

Sorry for being delinquent in posting, I’m working on a new schedule. But more later!