ICK!

*Big Sigh*

What a wild couple of days. I had a slight bump in the road to deal with as I got a migraine from hell that lasted about 48 hours. Yeah. It sucked. But it is over now and I am up and about.

I probably could have done with a few more hours worth of snooze time but there is some shit going down at my hovel that interfered.

OK, I really don’t want to talk about it much as it is rather unpleasant and not nice but here it is. We, The Hovel, suddenly have mice.

MICE! AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!

Fuck.

Gross

Ew

Living in a 100 year old dump has its downsides. I want to move.

OK! Here is what is happened. Yesterday morning I was unconscious after ingesting a fantastic amount of codeine for my headache and sleeping the sleep of the heavily and happily drugged and SUDDENLY Yoshi jumped up from her own daily coma to leap over me and dive behind the bed. I am talking about a stage type dive of intensity only possibly equaled by Kurt Cobain at an outdoor Nirvana concert. She was a cat with a mission. I heard meowing and scratching underneath my bed and then the cat burst out, ran like crazy and proceeded to stare intently at the bookcase in my hallway. At this time I had not seen anything but that cat was focused on that one area. I got my trusty umbrella and the wussy that I am I poked and prodded behind there and didn’t see, hear or find anything either. The cat remained “on duty” in that hallway for over 3 hours before I could tempt her away with treats. Obviously there was a mouse and we missed it. Now here is an indication of how poorly I was feeling. No, I did not vacuum the whole house as well as wash the floors with a toothbrush, wash Yoshi with fragrant yet antibacterial soaps, bathe myself half a dozen times, perform a voodoo cleansing ritual and check my cheese supply to see if had been breeched as I would normally do in that situation. No, I simply went right back to bed and right to sleep. I was totally out of it. Pain completely overrode revulsion.

Now I was aware there might be mice in the house as my upstairs neighbours had seen one a couple times in their place and I had heard scurrying behind the walls one night a few weeks back. I had indeed mentioned this to my house caretaker and he said that he thought there was a mouse somewhere and not to worry about it. I did actually worry for a little bit but never saw or heard anything. I thought I might be immune to the problem because I am obsessively clean and anally tidy. In fact, once again I was feeling a little smug.

I should know I am about to get a karmic ass-kicking as soon as I feel smug.

So today I was sitting at my computer gingerly looking at some blogs and I hear this almighty scrabbling noise from my kitchen. Namely Yoshi freaking out over something. I looked over my shoulder to see Yoshi running from the kitchen with a mouse in her mouth! *shudder* She was running with a freaked out look on her face and the mouse’s tail was waving at me from her mouth. Then I proceeded to freak and ran after Yoshi yelling something along the lines of, “FUCKFUCKFUCKOHNOFUCKOHSHIT AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!” Yoshi then proceeded to run with the Wee Mousie INTO MY BEDROOM! My place where I get naked and vulnerable and exposed. And sleep too! I ran to see that Yoshi had let the mouse go and the damned thing was running for a foot or two only for Yoshi to catch it again. At this point I think I was yelling something along the lines of, “DROPITOHGODNODON’TDROPITOHNOOHSHIT!!” Basically being your garden variety pussy.

I am not afraid of mice as I could very well cuddle with this same mouse if I found it in a cage at the pet store but fast running wild mice that hang around unclean places have GERMS and might be icky. They also might bite.

I ran over to my next door neighbour who is not afraid of rodents. Her freak out is spiders. We all have our issues. It turns out her cats had caught and killed four mice the previous day. So she came over and we found that Yoshi had lost the mouse and was staring at my little shelf that holds all my beauty crap. So we moved all that stuff aside while the cat was howling and found a teensy tiny Wee Mousie in the corner totally terrified. My neighbour got a pen and a box (exterminator tools of the trade) and she coaxed the little critter into the box. Can you see a change in tone here? While a mouse is running free in my place I am freaking out but once it is safely stowed in a container my soft side comes out and I get all teary and mushy and stuff.

We let the mouse go in the alley. It was just so little and cute and tiny. And now out of my apartment. I named it Frank. Frank is free now.

So now Yoshi is the BIG MOUSER and got tuna for dinner. I have to admit I am a little hesitant to let her lick me with that same mouth that cradled the mousie though. No more kisses! I have anthropomorphized her so much seeing her with that mouse in her jaws was as horrifying to me as it would be seeing your toddler with a mouse in his or her pie hole. But I am very proud of her. She is no longer my sweet and lazy cat but a predator with hunting skills and blood thirst. Well, maybe not the thirst as Yoshi is normally so gentle with the stuff she catches. She will carry a moth around the house in her mouth and deposit it here and there to play with only to carry it somewhere else. She never kills them. I don’t think she would have killed the mouse today. Just hung out with it for a while.

We are both big softies.