Join the Jamboree
My days of walking into our bathroom with any degree of confidence or indifference are over. Over, I tell you! Why? Because of a mouse.
After pulling myself out of bed early enough to make sure that the alarm didn’t go off and scare the crap out of me (as I was already freaked out by zombie dreams that involved Bill Clinton and my sister as a six-year-old), I dragged my reluctant body to the bathroom, ready to take the shower I hoped would wake me up a bit. I flipped on the light, reached to turn on the shower, and saw a blurry, gray thing running out of the corner of my eye. The hell!?
As it darted to hide under the radiator, I gaped. As it then decided to dart back at me for some unknown reason, I shrieked like a little girl and jumped onto the tub’s edge (how I kept my balance, I don’t know). The mouse then decided to go back under the radiator, and I briefly considered the idea of just taking a shower with the damn mouse in the room.
But dammit, I needed to pee. And I was not going to pee with a mouse less then a foot away under the radiator.
So who was I gonna call? IP!
So yes, I admit that I went girly-girl and had to call in the fiancé to help me with this little dilemma. I hopped down from the tub and shot out of the bathroom. “Hon,” I whispered to IP, who was still dozing in bed, “Hon, there’s a mouse in the bathroom.”
“A mouse?” IP asked. “I thought I heard you give a little yell.” He climbed out of bed and went to examine the bathroom. “Get me a container, I’ll catch it and we’ll take it outside.”
I ran to get him a container while he prowled the bathroom. “Do you see it?” I asked as I handed him a container that had formerly held the wonton soup we shared last night.
“Yeah, I see it. Just a minute.” IP closed the door and I heard him searching for the mouse. After five minutes of activity, IP opened the door. “It’s gone,” he said.
“What? How?” To give you an idea of our bathroom, it’s just a small rectangle of a room; there are no holes in the tiling or around the fixtures that we can see. How a rather large mouse managed to escape into god knows where is beyond us. “I’m not insane, right? You saw it, right?”
“No, no, it was there,” IP reassured me. “You’re still insane, though.”
“Thanks, hon.”
We then discussed where the mouse might have come from. Perhaps it emerged from our linen closet, which has a small utility door that opens up to piping? And is this one of the mice who inhabit our downstairs neighbor’s pad, making its way up to our apartment much like cockroaches do? And will this be the one time we see a mouse (which happened in IP’s old apartment in the same community) before it flees back to the safety of our neighbor’s apartment? Time will tell.
What a wake up, though. Yeesh.
I should have asked you to get me the container before I got it out from behind the radiator. I thought it would remain cowering in the by the tub corner until I got it, but nope – it just disappeared. I have no idea where it went off to.
But we’ve lived in that apartment now for around 15 months and this is the first time we’ve seen – or even seen signs of – a mouse. So maybe it is an anomaly, especially since it was in the bathroom.
Like you mentioned, I saw a mouse exactly once when I lived downstairs. It was in the living room. When I went after it, it ran under my (nonfunctional) dishwasher, back towards P**’s apartment (the source of all vermin, insects, and fumes in the building, I’m convinced), and I never saw another mouse.
So this may be a one-time occurrence, perhaps spurred on by the sudden warming in temperature (or by watching that Speedy Gonzalez/Slowpoke Rodriguez thing on youtube). If not, we’ll be prepared next time and we’ll get it.
Still, like I said this morning, those things can scare you when you first see them.
It really did scare the hell out of me, especially since it first darted out from behind me (and just the idea of a mouse running over my feet is ugh, ugh, ugh even if it didn’t happen). It probably made its way down to P**’s apartment. GAH! Damn you, P**’s!
Hopefully it stays gone.