Mickey & Minnie

This past week I learned that I have a mouse problem in the house. Last Wednesday night, our daughter came in from Little Rock to leave for the wedding in College Station the next day. After she moved out, I transformed her upstairs bedroom into my sewing room, and I still had some pre-wedding sewing going on when she got there. She decided to sleep downstairs in her brother's old room. She was upstairs in our room sometime after 1:00 am that night telling me there was a terrible noise downstairs. Once I was awake enough to respond, I called the cat's name. She was nearby; not downstairs making noise. I scooped up the cat and went downstairs. I heard a noise in the wall between the back staircase and the hall to the downstairs bedrooms right away and knew it was mice. The cat perked up because she heard it, too. I put her down and she walked up and down the hall sniffing the wall, but couldn't do any more than that. I couldn't do anything about it because we were leaving the next morning. Now, I assumed this was a new event, with the temperatures about to change. We don't get evidence of mice every year in the fall, but it has happened often enough over the years to be half way expected. It is a big, country house on piers that turned 80 years old this year. Sometime over the four days we were in Texas for the wedding, our son and his new bride heard the story and chimed in with their own versions of hearing the mice while staying downstairs. I was appalled that it had been going on for that long and nobody had mentioned it. Can't fix it if we don't know about it.

Today I bought a supply of mouse bait. This evening, I emptied out the floor of the food pantry that has an access panel to the area beneath the stairway. The cat and I had heard the mice last night. I pried the panel off and saw where the little beggars had removed some of the sealant I had plugged holes years before with and had gotten in. I was expecting to see a whole mouse circus set up under the stairs when I opened the panel. I was relieved not to see much of anything. I had cleaned behind it years before and it still looked pretty good. I called the cat to come check it out. She walked all around the area for 15 minutes or so, sniffing and investigating. When she was done, I tossed in some bait and closed the panel. I will re-seal it tomorrow. I left everything out of the pantry so the cat can patrol it during the night. I will toss some bait up in the attic and between the floors tomorrow and hope that will work as well as it has in the past.

On the outside, I was glad to see the hummingbirds are still here. Below are some pictures I took last week. They are all over the red turk's cap flowers. Gulf fritillary butterflies also enjoy the turk's cap.