For the past few weeks we have been terrorized by a mouse in the house. If you've ever had a mouse in your house then you will understand the utter disgust that seems to travel through your body everytime you think you hear scratching in the walls. Most likely you are hearing scratching in the walls. Which was the case for me around July.1st... only I didn't know it.

I guess I can be easily duped into believing anything. That night I was clearing out my bookcase to make room for more unread books that needed to be glanced at when I heard a faint scratching noise coming from my window wall. I opened my blinds and there was nothing there. (Keep in mind, I am in the basement.) I started freaking out, thinking there was an animal in the wall trying to get at me.

I called my parents in (because I'm still a 26yr old loser who lives with her parents) and told them to listen. They heard the scratching but quickly explained that it was the fireworks just over yonder in our neighbourhood. I opened my window and sure enough fireworks were heard. So my mind was at ease and the scratching stopped just around the same time the fireworks did.

Weeks later, I'm at work when I phone my mother to ask her a question and she tells me we have an unwanted guest in the house. I'm conjuring up images of old aunt Berthas and uncle Martins and the like when she says it's a mouse. That freaked me out.

I came home from work that day and refused to go into my room until it was thoroughly checked. Needless to say that my parents had cleaned out from underneath the sink and all of our cupboards to find mouse droppings everywhere. So they washed all of the pots and pans and tupperware and containers and what have you; they pretty much sterilized everything. They put everything in containers with lids. Nothing would be left out.

But thankfully the mouse had not gotten into the pantry with all the cereals. Phew. Dodged that bullet.

The mouse got into the pantry with all the cereals and spices and packages of pasta and soups-in-a-cup. There were mouse droppings everywhere! The mouse had been eating the label off of the cornsyrup bottle. This was last weekend just before my father and I were set to leave for a weekend in another province. We left my poor mother to clean that pantry by herself, unfortunately/fortunately.

And clean, she did. She said she cleaned that thing til she was red, raw and bleeding. She stuffed all holes with steel wool, because apparently that's the one thing mice won't eat. The mouse had eaten through a couple of cereal boxes and some spices. For a little mouse, he sure shit a lot.

We came home from the weekend and saw the entire kitchen in tupperware. Nothing was left open. All cereal was in tupperware with lids sealed tight. No cereal boxes anywhere. Labels were taped to the tupperware containers. It was tupperware heaven. The old biddies at the tupperware parties would have been proud.

I called my parents from work on this past Monday to be told I had a funeral to attend. Mickey had finally died. I inquired about the cause of death: peanut butter trap. What a glorious way to go.

My father had figured out that the mouse had been travelling between the walls from the kitchen to his work-area beside my room. He went rooting in there, my father not the mouse, to find that bugger and discovered a half-eaten wire. The mouse had eaten the protective coating off of a wire with hopes of getting back up to the kitchen. But on the Sunday night, my father had plugged up that hole and put a trap with peanut butter next to it.

So the mouse is gone, halleluiah. We are hoping that it's only one mouse. But, needless to say, once you get one, you never go back to your carefree "let's leave the cereal IN the cereal boxes because that's what cereal boxes are for" way of living.

It's still tupperware heaven here. I cringe because it leaves extra work for me to do while drying the dishes at night. And I cringe because it took 3 weeks for us to notice mouse-droppings when the earliest knowledge of us having a mouse was July.1st and even a few days before then because my mother had heard scratching in the walls when she was looking for a book in my room.

So.. what uncovered tupperware containers did he lounge around in that we took and ate from? Oh the horror.

And yesterday I look at the front page of the newspaper to read a story about how a woman, here in my city, went to the bathroom to find a rat doing the breaststroke in her toilet bowl. Now I'm paranoid about going to the bathroom. I'm constantly looking down into the bowl because far be it for me to sit there while a rat bites me in my ass. These are the times I wish I had a penis so I could stand up and look in the toilet bowl with ease while I pee.

Yes, penis envy, Freud would smirk knowingly.

Just last night I had my hearing aids in and I was about to pee when I heard a gurgling sound. I jumped off that toilet bowl so fast I whacked my crotch on the sink counter. It hurt, but it's probably still the most action I've had since February.