I think I caught most of the mice now. Maybe just the dumbest ones, I don’t know. They were coming to the trash bag that hangs under the kitchen sink to eat their dinner, and making one hell of a mess of it, too. Weren’t trying hard at all to hide what they were doing. It got so bad that half of the stuff I scraped off the dinner plates fell through the holes they made in the bag onto the floor. When it gets that bad, I get off my lazy ass and start catching me some mice.

I use a no-kill method to catch mice. I have to. I’m married to My Darling B. She wants to believe I can’t kill mice, and I want her to keep on believing that, so I bought mouse traps that look like Lego bricks, baited them with peanut butter (because I heard that mice are powerless when it comes to resisting peanut butter), and left them propped open in the cupboard under the sink, where we would find scattered kitchen scraps and mouse droppings every morning.

I caught one a couple days ago and stupidly thought that was the one that was doing all the damage. What a big dope. What a large ass. What an ultramaroon. There’s never just one mouse. The kitchen scraps and the mouse turds kept coming back, so I baited the trap again and caught another mouse, bigger and filled with a lot more wee-wee than the first one was. And that seems to be about the end of the mice for now, but that second one had enough pee in him for ten mice.

Catch a mouse, and you find out just how much urine one of those little furry things can hold. When one gets stuck in a trap, seems like the first thing he does in there is whiz all over himself, and if he’s in there for more than five minutes, he whizzes all over himself again. But this big guy – he was a lawn sprinkler. He pissed up a storm. A monsoon, even. I had to grab a couple paper towels to sop up the spillage as I was handling the trap to dump him into a pail for transfer to a local park. This little guy’s name should’ve been “Cloudburst.”

Or “Stinker.” Stank like a urinal with a broke flusher in the most popular bar in town on a Friday night. I have been face-down on many a tiled bathroom floor, but I have never smelled piss as rank as that. Made me want to wash my hands in a bucket of raw bleach, then rinse with Pine-Sol.

When I finally finished cleaning myself up, we took a little ride in the car down to a park by the lake shore where My Darling B could tip the bucket into the underbrush and let him run away. If he makes it all the way back to our house from there, he can eat all the kitchen scraps he wants.