Mother.
Fucking.
Fuck.
Hawaii isn't perfect. One of the downsides to living here is cabin fever. I've always loved roaming around, having the freedom to go where I want, when I want. Long roadtrips are my jam, and while sure, it takes three hours to get around the island, it isn't quite the same if I start from home and spend three hours driving...home.
The biggest downside so far is the house mice. About a month ago, I wandered into the kitchen to make myself some food, I took out my measuring cups, got out my ingredients, got distracted a little by trying to find a good video essay to listen to on YouTube, came back into the kitchen, and fucking screamed my ass off when I saw a writhing, adorable little mouse in one of my measuring cups. To clarify, I didn't scream because I'm terrified of mice. I rather love them. I screamed because I was very startled, I thought I was hallucinating and my cup was spinning into a fuzzy vortex or some shit, and also maybe because evolution made me do it (it's true! Evolution made me scream!). I screamed loudly enough that the mouse stopped worming around the cup, jumped right out, and ran away. I told Derek that there was a mouse (after running out of the kitchen, of course. Like a perfectly normal human that is not scared of mice in the least), he didn't really believe me, and then the next few weeks, I kept fucking hearing the god damn mouse, and it was starting to drive me crazy.
As I've said every chance I can, I am a holier-than-thou vegan, so when it comes to setting mouse traps, they have to be catch and release mouse traps that won't hurt the adorable little critters (and Hawaiian house mice really are fucking cute). Derek bought three humane mouse traps, we set them up, and waited. For a week, absolutely not a peep from our vermin roommate. I kept baiting the traps with Derek's cheese, but the mouse wanted none of it. I tried a little piece, and...I mean...I get it. The cheese was fucking AWFUL. I tried peanut butter, and BAM! We caught our little house mouse. I was upstairs getting ready for bed, and Derek was frantically calling me to come downstairs, and when I did, aggravated and yelling about not being able to get a moment of peace (which is frankly rich, coming from me), I was so fucking delighted to see we had a little guest. So we put him in a box, drove him five miles away, and then dropped his mousey ass off at a park.
I don't think either of us figured that was it for hice mice, but speaking for myself, I kind of just forgot that house mouses are a problem of living here and I went on living my life. A few nights ago, Derek and I had stir fried bok choy, and kind of sort of went upstairs to go to bed without cleaning up the kitchen, leaving the wok and its bok choy oil on the stove. I woke up at 4am for some water, and when I came downstairs, I heard this really fucking weird noise that I couldn't discern. I was looking around the kitchen, and I saw the wok moving back and forth, so I steeled myself for a huge cockroach (another massive problem in Hawaii. The cockroaches out here are so fucking MASSIVE, and the ONLY thing you can do is kill them, because they are in your house no matter what. Spotless, dirty, it doesn't matter. You share a house with cockroaches unless you put poison down) and peeked in to find instead the world's oiliest mouse trying to jump out of my wok and having zero success at it. It seems that bok choy is a tasty morsel no matter what genus you belong to, and my little house guest had wanted in on our leftover action. I still have no idea how he got in the wok (though I did learn that mice can jump almost two feet, which is extraordinary!), but I was pleased and agitated that we had inadvertently snagged another one.
I went upstairs to wake Derek up, he groggily came down to help me put the mouse mouse into a more secure holding spot (a decked out spinach container, if you're curious, complete with cozy mouse bed, water, peanut butter, and spinach leaves), and in his grog, he accidentally tipped the wok at such an angle that mouse mouse jumped right out, left a splat of an oil mark on our slate tile kitchen floor, and then he ran under the oven. We laughed and went up to bed, knowing we needed to rebait the traps in the morning. no sooner had we rebaited, then who should appear but a tiny little baby of a mouse mouse! Absolutely adorable, no more than a few weeks old, which is way cute, but way bad news, because this means we now have proof that there are enough mice in our house to be breeding. We were hoping these two mice had been one-offs, as we had never seen mice in our house until January. We've lived here since July, and it seemed to make sense that we would have heard or seen them long before now. Some light researching showed that cockroaches, lizards, AND mice tend to migrate in during the winter months on the islands ("winter"), but that doesn't mean we have any less of a problem. The heece meece are making smaller meeces, and mice are fucking voracious little breeders, so I started freaking out that we might have to hire an exterminator to kill off these little dudes that just want to live out their lives like the rest of us:happy, cozy, well fed, and living behind someone's oven. I prepare the spinach box again and bring it outside to Derek so he can help me let it loose into its temporary home, and my dumb ass didn't have the lid on securely, and out it fucking popped, and it scurried under the house. After a light chastising from Derek that I thoroughly deserved (he got one from me after tipping the wok, so it's absolutely fair), I went into the house to replace and rebait the trap.
About a week ago, we got a new cat. A handsome little tuxedo that Derek named Mr. Floopies (he's officially named Ae'o, but Mr. Floopies has a certain charm, and it's just what we call him now). He's Lili's age (seven months), they're good little buddies, and he's a very affectionate, alert, smart little button of a cat with a 90 degree angle in his tail. Two nights ago, an ungodly ruckus kept waking Derek and I up in the middle of the night from behind our bed. Mr. Floopies is a very active critter, unlike our fat fat Lili, who will sleep in her drawer all night without so much as a peep or wriggle. Mr. Floopies wants to be under the covers, then at your head, then in his drawer, then at your feet, then between your legs...he's a very active night cat, so while this new banging around was a new PLACE for him to be active, him making noise at 3am wasn't out of character.
6:30 yesterday morning, I wake up to a chirping Mr. Floopies, very loudly announcing his presence on the bed, and what did he drop on me, you might be wondering even though you shouldn't be because I'm horrible at twists? A dead baby mouse mouse. I praised him for his solid hunting skills, called Derek, and tried to resolve myself to having to dispose of this poor mouse carcass. As I was steeling myself to do just that, Mr. Floopies came back to grab his prize again, I yelled, and he stole his dead mouse toy behind the bat, and proceeded to thwomp around with it for a few minutes before bringing it back out to me so I could appreciate it once again. This time, I praised him again and locked him in the bathroom so I could dispose of this mouse properly. He had bitten out his eyes, and I was quite sad for this little mouse mouse, but pleased that Mr. Floopies is such a keen little hunter.
Now, if you couldn't tell our cats apart because Lili is an orange tabby and Mr. Floopies is a tuxedo cat with a very distinct bend in his tail, one way to figure them out is Mr. Floopies is INSANELY active, and Lili is a lazy priss with a god complex. For the last week, Derek and I have felt pretty confident that Mr. Floopies hears the mice in the cupboards and smells their scent trails, and may see them running around under the oven and fridge. Lili couldn't give two shits about what's going on in the kitchen unless you're offering her morsels of yummies. I've vocalized to Derek more than once my fears of Mr. Floopies being a really good mouser and dropping dead mice on our bed, or hiding them in our laundry (he likes to be in the closet in our laundry bins), or leaving dead mice behind the bed where they will rot and smell. So here we are, I have been right once, and I have a feeling that is not the last dead mouse mouse that Mr. Floopies will gift us.
Last night, in the middle of writing this, I felt compelled to go check the traps. The reason I didn't finish this last night was I found TWO baby mice in one trap. A twofer! So Derek and I had to go drop them off far from the house. Of course I found mice last night while writing about my meece problem. Of course I did. We also went and bought four more mouse traps. I don't want Mr. Floopies killing these little mice, I really don't. I can deal with that better than I can deal with poisoning them, or calling an exterminator, because it's far more natural that HE kill them than WE kill them, but neither path is preferable. The traps are working well so far, we just need to...you know...stop dropping the little guys when we catch them.
Because the universe has no shortage of ironies, when we took our newest meeces to a large field with plenty of hiding spaces for them, it was fucking FULL of cats. Just lousy with felines. I told Derek to take me back to the park, he said I was being ridiculous, and then he took the meeces to the tree and released them.
Welp. Here's to pretending that the mice are now living in Hawaii's version of Redwall, safe from starving ferals.
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