Here is a pic from nature:
And because I don’t have an amazing dating story to tell you from over the weekend, I will thrill you with an amazing story from my past. Well, maybe it’s amazing. It’s usually a hit, though tonight at our house meeting when I told it while we were discussing how many “have a heart” mouse traps we should get (instead of the old fashioned neck breakers), my roomies were less than impressed. You be the judge.
So this is set in a a second hand trailer on top of a hill in the middle of the country, that my family stayed in on weekends. Bonfires and hiking and such. It was awesome. Since the land was in the middle of farmland, there were mice. During the winter, those little field mice thought our trailer was a great place to live and they moved on in. They were stoked, they found chips, oreos, pasta, everything a country mouse dreams of. By the time we discovered our mouse problem and put all that kind of stuff out of their gnawing abilities, they were established and weren’t going anywhere. My dad wanted to put out traps, but since we didn’t go out there very often in the winter, the old fashioned snappers would just be bad and putrid if it caught a mouse. A trip to the hardware store sparked the engineer in my dad, and he devised a special trap for us. First, he started with this kind of trap, pictured here:
it works like this… since mice like to run along the edges of the wall where it’s safe and crumbs fall, this box goes on the floor against the wall where the mouse is sure to encounter it. It has to go around the box, and on it’s way around the box, the mouse sees a tunnel to the other side…a short cut! And of course the mouse wants to take the short cut, so it goes through the little mouse sized tunnel. In the middle of the tunnel is a trigger that mice aren’t intelligent enough to know not to set off, which is how the trap gets the mice. When they set off this trigger, the mouse is flipped into this other compartment of the box, and the trap resets itself. And this is usually where the story ends, the mouse dies in the compartment or someone kills it. But again, we didn’t go out to the trailer enough to take care of a pile of dead mice which would surely stink up the trailer, and alert any other mice not to crawl through the tunnel. So another component was built into the trap to take care of this problem. In the top of the compartment where the mice get flipped into, was another mouse sized hole. Leading to a tube. Of course the mouse doesn’t want to be in a little aluminum cage, so it thinks, “well lookie here! An escape route!” and decides to climb up the tube. Up and up and up it goes, until it starts to curve down, and next thing the mouse knows, is that the tube has turned into a slide, and it slides down into a gallon jar with a hole in the top. This is the part where people start to not like me for telling this story, and I’ll tell you the truth, recounting the mouse’s journey through the trap has made me a little sad. But on we go. To the gruesome end. The gallon jar is filled with anti-freeze and the mouse dies. The mouse drowns in antifreeze and is preserved a little bloaty until we take it out, there’s no smell and do you know what? The mouse problem was taken care of that winter. Sometimes we’d find 6 mice in the jar, sometimes 1. At first I was mad at my dad for being a Hitler for mice, but he asked me if it was better to make them starve to death, or give them a quick death. After some deep thoughts and remembering how my gerbil Nibbles bit my nose all the time, I said “drown”.
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