A mouse in the house

Two blog posts in two days! Craziness! This is what happens when you're self-quarantined due to conjunctivitis. While I wait for my eye drops to arrive from Phnom Penh, I had a little visitor to deal with...

Yesterday afternoon, I chased a mouse around my house with a bowl. I tried to capture it, but the wily bugger got away. This was the second time yesterday there was a mouse in the basket in my shower. There is nothing for it to eat, no soap out or anything. It just likes sitting in my basket?

Later that night,
the mouse has been caught! After chasing it around twice today, the little bugger came back a third time. It pushed its luck and now it is sitting under a bucket, under a rice cooker (in case it tries to get out). I was on my way to bed when this happened. And, being tired and cruel, I decided to leave it there overnight and deal with it in the morning.

Mouse under the bucket under my body wash

Morning comes and I take a piece of linoleum to slip under the bucket and flip it over. Success! (Although I pinched its leg - and it squealed - sorry!)  I put the top on the bucket (it's normally my composting bucket and conveniently has a lid) and took it outside to see if the dogs were awake to 'dispose' of it. Well. They were awake and I got them all exited by getting them to sniff the bucket and get ready to kill that mouse! Then the landlady's youngest daughter came outside and I was like, is this cool? She shook her head. Wait here. Okay, I thought, they don't want the dogs to kill it, so what will they use? She got dressed and I followed her outside of the gate and around the corner outside the exterior wall of the property. I was thinking, is there a specific dog or something that kills mice? Are we feeding it to the neighbourhood mice killer?

No, no we weren't. She let the mouse go! I was like "It will come back!" She said "No." Ugh!! I cannot emphasize how much this killed me. Mice always come back! Why wouldn't it? It really, really liked the basked in my shower. And not killing the mouse is just allowing the mouse population to continue to thrive, not even attempting to make a dent in it. I was annoyed, and tried to calm myself by thinking, "They're Buddhist. Maybe that's why they don't kill it?"

Either way, whenever I inevitably catch another mouse (or the big-eyed rat/gerbil/whatever it is) I will be sure to 'dispose' of it myself. It's a jungle out there...