If rodents aren't your thang, then just move along, there's nothing to see here . . .

Yesterday Dave was in the kitchen while I was attempting to wrestle the lid off of my (now chipped, because I dropped it yesterday) coffee cup. I hear him half say/half mumble something from the kitchen " . . . spending too much time with the rats because I thought I just saw one across the . . . so weird . . . " by then, I had stopped listening. I could only half hear him, I was annoyed at my current project, and it seemed like he was just musing for the sake of it.

Turns out not so much.


We caught a mouse last night. Eeeeeek!

And, despite my zoological training, the weeks that I lived at the wildlife hospital in Hingham, and the fact that I've owned every small animal know to man, I shrieked like a girl and hopped from foot to foot. Twice!


It's the element of surprise that causes the shrieking, I swear. I'm standing, texting a friend, when suddenly a see a tiny dark streak out of the corner of my eye. I gasped and told Dave that I thought a mouse might be under the couch, and he started an excited "Hey! Didn't you hear me this afternoon?! I saw something too. Only right away I figured I must be hallucinating."

(((Side note- What the hell? How is that a logical leap? When faced with a discrepant event, such as mouse in a forever-mouseless apartment, I would try to figure out what the frick is going on. Dave, apparently, just figures that he's hallucinating. Hallucinating?)))

Anyway, long story short, we clear the living room so that we can see all the way around the couch, open the door to the terrace, and ready ourselves with mouse-catching buckets. And we caught him (Dave scared him towards me and I got him in a bin).

As it turns out, he's freakishly tiny, hops with lightening speed, and burrows under woodchips (this morning I thought he had made an escape from the cage we kept him in last night).

I'm just a little tiny mouse . . . .

But I can cause big trouble . . . .

Check out tiny mouse vs. former rat baby (now he's a big jumbo rat)

Sigh. So, for those of you keeping track at home, we now have the snakes (2), the rabbits (2), the rats (6), and one very small hopping mouse.