Mouse in the house

'Twas Saturday night and all through the house not a creature was stirring except one little mouse. It was that little annoying, scratching, scraping noise somewhere in the walls surrounding our living room that caught my attention. But like many noises, if no one else is around to hear them (like my wife), then there is no noise at all. Of course, every time I moved around the room to find the mouse, he didn't.

Sunday morning, I heard him again, but this time so did Lois. Now the mouse and I were both as good as dead. The mouse if I caught him and me if I didn't. On a desperate whim, I opened the spring-loaded hose door for the built-in house vacuum system that we have never used. There he was staring right back at me. He was just as surprised as I was, and I know if he could have run straight up the eight foot plastic pipe to the attic, he would have.

I spoke nicely to him to coax him out. I even put one of our ubiquitous Tupperware containers with a dab of peanut butter in it over the opening and held it against the wall for about ten minutes. I continued our negotiations, but he just wasn't hungry.

I began to think like my mentor, Tim Taylor on the Home Improvement sitcom, who always found a newer, bigger, and more powerful way to do something. I thought maybe the mouse would, like any kid and many adults, enjoy a high speed thrill ride through a looped and twisted pneumatic hose. It's not often that I get to bring the Shop-Vac into the living room at ten in the evening, but desperation had finally set in. I turned on the Shop-Vac, opened his door, and gave the little guy the biggest thrill ride he ever had.

Note:  No mice were actually hurt in the creation of this blog. He's just a little colder because he's now in the woods where he belongs rather than in my walls, where he doesn't.