Mouse for Sale

This morning, as is the case every Wednesday morning, I woke up at 6AM. Whilst standing in my dark kitchen making myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch -- part of my new Monday/Wednesday Budget Lunch Plan -- I couldn't help but notice that something had chewed a whole in the paper-bagged loaf of Italian bread I'd left out on the counter overnight, leaving a nickel-sized spot of bare bread and a thousand shreds of white paper bag.

It would appear we have a mouse in our house.

Now all that remains is What To Do With It.

The savior in me wants to buy a Hav-a-Hart trap and set it free in the wilds of Ninth Avenue.

The realist in me knows that the only realistic route is going to be a snap-trap or one of those sticky pads.

Having recently entered my office to find a still-squeaking, still-breathing, still-kicking mouse stuck to one of these pads, and then watching helplessly and unhelpingly as my medical colleague disposed of it first in a plastic bag, then under his show, then in the trash basket, I am well aware of my weakness around sticky pads. I've also heard the urban legends about mice that chew off their own limbs just to escape the sticky pads, leaving a sticky bloody mess in their wake, and we only just recently cleaned our kitchen floor.

At the same time, the last thing I want to be left with is a half-dead mouse left twitching with its little crushed mouse trachea under the oppressive-but-not-quite-deadly bar of the snap-trap. The snap-trap is most likely a swifter and more painless death, but the sticky pads provide a more generous dead-mouse-to-human-hand berth.

I keep coming back to the 40-pound chicken pot sitting on the shelf but this only gives me the What, and not the How.

It's true what my therapist says, life really is Uncertain.