Teeny tiny visitors.....

Give me a blessed break...... there's a mouse in the house, and it's a smart one. You would think that with cats in the house, this would be the last refuge for a tiny mouse. But I guess this little creature knows that the cats aren't allowed on the second floor, so that's where the mouse has taken up residence. Not only does the mouse know he's safe from the cats, but somehow he found out that we have the birds on the second floor..... two parakeets who toss seeds out of their cage if they come across some that they don't much care for.

The mouse has been hiding the seeds under the sofa in my dressing room..... I discovered that when I moved the sofa out from the wall when I was painting in there. Two little piles of seeds, nice and neat. Two little piles of mouse-poop, not so neat. I vacuumed all of that up, painted the wall behind the sofa, and then put two sticky traps in the spots where the mouse stashed the birdseed. For two days, not a seed was taken and hidden away. Not a sign of the mouse. On the third day, there were three seeds behind the sofa, and one of the sticky-traps had been moved.... not just moved over an inch or so, but moved about three feet. Had the mouse moved it any further, it would have been just about in the middle of the room--- and guess who would have probably stepped on it.....

The mouse is still up here somewhere.... I keep checking behind the sofa, at least two or three times a day. The parakeets are still spitting out the seeds that they don't like.... and the dust-buster seems to be constantly in use. Every time I go in there, the dust-buster is in my hand and I'm making sure to scoop up every bit of seed that gets on the floor in there.

As if a mouse isn't enough...... we had an electrician here late this afternoon to start installing outlets and light switches up on the third floor.... the soon-to-be-a-library third floor. The electrician was working away for nearly two hours and then he called down the stairs to me: "Do y'all know that y'all have a bat up here?" Give me a blessed break......

We had a bat flying around in this house last year... we don't know how it got in here, but it took us two hours to get him out. We also caught two or three bats on sticky traps.. they were walking through the walls and ended up in the closet with the furnace, where I have an obstacle course of sticky-traps for all things crawling and creeping and wandering around after midnight. (Country living.... they don't tell you this part when they advertise the bucolic and serene rural settings.)

I gave the electrician a crab net and a broom.... he asked for a baseball bat, but the closest thing I had to that was a wooden oar for a sailboat. He tried to catch the bat in the crab net (I wouldn't recommend that method)..... then he tried swatting it with the broom (that worked better, but he nearly fell down the stairs). Finally, the bat got tired of that game and flew into a crack near the end of the wall up there. That's all a bat needs-- a tiny slit, a slim crack, half-an-inch of open space and he's either inside or outside in seconds. We're hoping he went outside. I'm also hoping that we can get the sheet rock done as soon as the electrician is done..... and then the third floor will be sealed up tight. One would think.

So here I sit.... typing..... and there could be a mouse across the hallway, hiding parakeet seed underneath the sofa in my dressing room. And there could be a bat flying around upstairs on the third floor. And I sit. And type. I must be getting used to all of this because I'm not pacing the floor and telling my husband that a hundred-year-old house in the hills is not where we should be.

We should be here... it's the bat and the mouse that need to go.