I have been hunting mice lately, or rather, I have been catching mice with a trap lately. We purchased, several months ago, a TomCat-Live-Catch-Mouse-Trap. I rarely shill products on my blog, but let me tell you, this is a great invention. It does not kill the mice, so there is no gore to clean afterwards. No poison is needed, and no children can smash their fingers in the trap. It is a long tube balanced on a fulcrum. The mouse enters to tube to get the bait, the tube teeters to one side and the trap door shuts.

The only bad part of the trap is that it does not kill the mouse. You must either free the foul beast or dispose of it yourself.

The first mouse we caught was weeks ago. He had been coming onto the kitchen counter, scratching and gnawing the fruit. It was as if Jill got up in the middle of the night and took a bite out of each of the bananas and then ran a fine toothed comb across the peels. Jill denied doing this, so we got the Tomcat mousetrap.

After we caught the first mouse, we were having some kind of party, so I didn't get a chance to deal with it right away. He sat in the trap for over a day. Finally, I had a plan to deal with the live-trapped mouse.

I brought the trap upstairs to the bathroom and held it open over the yawning mouth of the toilet. First the mouse's thin, black, spaghetti tail whipped around the outside of the trap, and then (all the while scrabbling) he slid into the toilet. I held the plunger over his head while flushing the toilet and he was gone. Afterward, my heart thumping wildly, I urinated (also into the toilet) and flushed one more time for good measure.

The trap smelled terribly and had mouse shit in it so I had to wash it out.

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The second mouse trapping went much as the first, only the second mouse preferred graham crackers and Rolos.

The second mouse also had the gall to cling to the inside of the plunger while I was trying to flush him away.

I got the 2nd mouse almost right after he got into the trap, so he didn't have enough time even to finish the bait, let alone stink up the trap with his shit. I still rinsed out the trap, though. Now it is clean for its next use.