We are NOT a mouse house...

Ahhh, the joys of autumn...  (Insert contented drinking your cocoa sigh here.) I sit typing at the north end of the dining room.  The early afternoon sun warms my shoulders.  The house is deliciously warm.  If I wanted, I could take my laptop and write in front of a blazing fire in the family room.

And yet...and yet... Our three cats stare with x-ray vision at the dining room walls... What's that noise?  What do I hear?  scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch...  I knew it was too good to last.  Rodentia.  Renovating our house to make it theirs.  To be fair it only sounds like something small, mousish in size and perhaps only one of them driven indoors by the cooler weather to stake claim on a rodent condo in our... main floor ceiling / 2nd floor flooring joists.

I just want to say, "DUDE.  Please.  Not now.  We can't afford an exterminator.  We still have to patch the roof where the frickin' raccoons roosted last season." 

I am a lovers of animals.  I had an encounter with a squirrel last weekend that was delightful.  He ate spiced pecans OUT OF MY HAND, and then hung like freaking Spider Man from the tree trunk upside down to eat them.   I love rodents of all shapes and sizes,  I just don't want to HOUSE them.  We already have three cats and frequently take in animals to babysit.  No more animals in our house. 

Unless, of course, if someone said, "This poor blind, nearly lame, elderly dog has to find a home or be put down." David would then have a fight on his hands 'cause my immediate go-to is "I'LL DO IT!!!" And then I hold onto that animal in a near-suffocating hug as David tries his best to quell that urge within me.  Limpid blue eyes would blink blink up at him and I would win.  'Cause really, if person says NO  to a blind, nearly lame, elderly dog who won't live for much longer any way and really has nothing wrong with them apart from the being blind, nearly lame and elderly?  That person must be a Nazi, and nobody likes being called a Nazi.  Right David? So we're keeping this theoretical dog!

But now that there's the scritch-scritching, I'm imagining there must be an infestation, possibly of Biblical proportions - 'cause they apparently did plagues up really well back then.  So in the same way that when a pet has fleas every itch you have MUST be a flea bite, or when someone in your acquaintance has pink eye your own eye begins to twitch and water... Now, every sound in my century home that scritch scritches... is now a rodent with 26 others having a house party in our walls.  On the plus side though, the boiler isn't leaking as much...