EEK, THERE'S A MOUSE IN THE HOUSE...

...or there WAS a mouse, in the pantry.

I'm not quite sure why I didn't think to blog about this at the time. Probably I was too traumatized and tried to shove the experience into the deep recesses of my mind. But this morning it all came back to me in vivid detail as I read a post that made me laugh and laugh while I pictured myself reacting the same way.

My mouse experience started a couple of weeks ago when I was looking for something in my pantry and noticed a hole in a bag of Oodles of Noodles. I figured it must have torn as a result of being carelessly bagged at the grocery store, or as I tried to shove it into an overcrowded pantry shelf. Then, a couple of days later as I was putting some groceries away, I felt something lightly skim my forearm and roll under the stove. I assumed it was something that fell off the shelf, so I looked under the stove with a flashlight to retrieve it, but couldn't see a thing.

That evening my daughter and grandkids came for dinner, and I asked my granddaughter to look under the stove with the flashlight and see if she could find what had rolled under there. She couldn't see anything either, and must have thought I was having another one of those senior moments.

Anyway, the next day I decided I really had to do something about the pantry and started taking everything out of it so I could reorganize the shelves. In the process, I noticed a hole in a bag of egg noodles...and then some mouse turds...and then it struck me. There had been a mouse in my pantry. There were mouse turds everywhere--even on the wall behind the shelves. Yuck, gross!!!!!

I practically fell to my knees thanking God for His grace in keeping me from actually seeing the mouse or even imagining that that was what had so lightly brushed my arm as it jumped out and went scurrying to safety under the stove. Knowing that I had no hubby to call who could come to my rescue, and I would have most likely run screaming into the street, not even closing my apartment door beind me, or perhaps fainted or died on the spot--not a pretty sight for my daughter and grandkids to be greeted by--He came to my rescue Himself. Now how cool is that?

So try to make a long story a bit shorter, I had the handyman in my complex come up and move the stove, and sure enough, there was a mouse hole behind it which he plugged up. And God was gracious to me once again by keeping the mouse from returning before we did this, because the thought of setting out mouse traps freaked me out even more than the thought of seeing a live mouse. That just seemed too, too cruel. And if we would have used the Have A Heart kind that just traps them in a little cage so you can dump them elsewhere, my mice phobia is so extreme and irrational, I think it would have scared me just as much to see the poor little thing sitting behind bars as to see it running free.