Eek!

Clement and I had a little problem tonight.

Like, two inches little.

It's a very bad feeling to walk into your kitchen and have your eye caught by distinctly mammalian motion. Once it hit me that, yes, that was a mouse in the corner and, no, it wasn't going to work to scoop it up in the dustpan and drop it outside, Clement went to the deli and got glue traps, the only kind they had. After about an hour, we checked back on the traps and saw that one had caught the mouse. I googled "glue trap" and found lots of advocacy sites telling me how glue traps are the single least humane way of catching a mouse. Great. But one of them did say that if you have a live mouse in a glue trap, you can dissolve the glue with vegetable oil and push the mouse off with a pencil. So we took the entrapped mouse outside and did just that. Amazingly, it worked, and there's now an oily mouse with post-traumatic stress disorder roaming the streets of Hell's Kitchen.


this post excerpted from an email to mom