Mice? What mice?

We haven't heard a sound from up in the attic lately, and the three mice traps up there are empty. Not a squeak, not a peep, not a sound up there. My husband has checked the traps at least three times since the pest control guy put them up in the attic. I guess the mice have gotten the word out to every field mouse on the street. Stay away from that fancy cheese up there!

I have to laugh at the pest control guy and his traps, though--- we thought he'd put "humane" traps in the attic which would catch the mice without killing them. I had visions of him taking the mice and relocating them, bringing them to the grounds of the nearby Nature Center where they could live happily ever after. As my husband said-- we could have just gone to the hardware store ourselves and bought the wood and metal spring-traps that the pest control guy brought over here.... and saved ourselves the cost of his service call.

The little mice that munch on the birdseed in the yard are still there, but they don't hang around the feeders as long as they used to. I've stopped filling up the lowest feeder, and it seems that the mice don't want to compete with the squirrels in the feeders hanging from the crape myrtle branches.... the mice just eat the seeds that fall down into the grass.

Speaking of crape myrtles, our lawn guys decided to clip all the growth on the crape myrtle trees in the front of the house. When they came here last week, there wasn't much grass to cut and not many leaves to rake up, so they took out their clippers and went after the thin branches on the crape myrtles. I didn't realize what they were doing, and by the time I went out front, they had already clipped one of the trees and had started on the other. My face must have fallen, because the guy up in the tree started to climb down as soon as he saw me.

I told him that he may as well finish the job he started-- I didn't want one tree to be clipped down and the other one to be left half-clipped. I also told him not to touch anything else in the front front flowerbeds. He was all set to start clipping the boxwoods after the crape myrtles, I'm sure. He did that last year, and clipped them back so much that they looked as if they'd just been planted. It gets to be a joke here as I go out into the yard and play Charades with the lawn guys-- they don't speak much English, and I don't speak much Spanish, so I can't really "tell" them anything--- we both use gestures and hand signals to communicate.

How do you say Don't touch my crape myrtles again or I'll toss that clipper of yours into the bayou! in Spanish?