One of the more annoying things about Mr. Floopies is how god damn persistent he is for my attention in the very early morning. Starting at around 6am (which means I've only been sleeping for about three to four hours), he paces back and forth across my body, gets right into my face, meows at me a lot, tries to get under the covers, gets under the covers, wants out from under the covers, bites my hand so I'll pet him, bites me some more when I stop petting him because I've drifted off again, and all of this repeats until I finally fucking wake up and pet him until he's bored of my attention. Usually he just wants five minutes of pets and then he's off to harangue Lili, who has been sleeping peacefully in her drawer like a good fattums.
I woke up around 3 am this morning because I got my period a week early and I was bleeding all over my sheets, and Floopies was perched directly above my head on the headboard, but I thought nothing of it. I just looked at him and said, "I'm fucking bleeding, do you care?" and that was that. My husband is not here. Of course I'm talking to my cats.
At 6am, Mr. Floopies starts in with his bullshit ritual, except he was REALLY being fucking wild. Much more aggravating that usual, so much so that instead of nipping my hand, he sat down on my chest and bit my nose. Not very hard, but enough to get my attention. I petted him, because I'm an enabler, and grabbed my phone to see what time it was. It was 6:15, I saw I had a message from Allen, so I responded to it (super excited: he had written a story and wanted to know if I was interested in reading it, which...duh. Allen is a really great writer), and I was going to go back to sleep, except Floopies was still pacing the bed and meowing, so I sat up. He went and laid down on the floor, stretching his belly out (he's a VERY long cat. Long and skinny. Like one of those ridiculous pencils you can buy at joke shops) and luxuriating all over the floor. I figure he just wanted my attention, and I was right...he wanted my attention because he had killed another mouse mouse. It was dead on the floor right near my bed, which leads me to believe that the following had transpired:
1. Floopies killed a mouse mouse (nobody is going to argue that part)
B. He brought it upstairs once it was fully deadified, a look I will describe momentarily
iii. He put it on me to gift it to me/show it off to me and as I slept, I moved enough that it fell off the bed
Floopies has caught several meece in the last couple of weeks. The other day, I heard this really strange sound as I was reading, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was. I wrote it off as being someone working with lawn equipment a bit down the block, but it turned out to be Floopies, growling at Lili for having the audacity to look at the dead mouse mouse he had locked in his jaws for probably about fifteen minutes, no exaggeration. Derek found a mouse hole behind the oven and sealed it up before he left. He also looked behind the fridge, and we found no holes. We figured the heece meece only had the one entrance point, and no other nests, but it looks like we were damn fools. I've suspected they have a nest in the oven (I turned on the oven once and heard what sounded like a chorus of mice squealing in agony, but Derek wrote that off as my imagination because he had yet to see his first house mouse, and because we never smelled rotting mouse flesh, or found any charred corpses, I forgot about my stove theory until Derek chastised himself for not checking the stove when he sealed up the mouse hole). I thought the first mouse Floopies killed was a straggler, someone who got left behind when the house door was closed for good. I expected a mouse or two after the fact, honestly. But this is three now, and it would appear that there is another meece nest somewhere in my kitchen, but I do not fucking know where. Derek checked all the holes, and I am afraid to check them again. I really love mice, they are so fucking adorable, but my brain makes me scream at tiny little furry things (you hear that, balls?) even if I don't actually feel threatened by them.
Floopies is a huge fan of biting out the eyes of these mice, and their bodies always look the same, and I described it to Allen in the following way:
their eyes are always bitten out, and their tiny little mouse jaws are always open, like in a scream, and their front mouse arms are always in the up position, so they kind of look like blind animals on a roller coaster, screaming as the go down a big drop.
This is very true, and while it's kind of funny, it bums me out hard.
I scooped up the dead mouse, threw it away, took out the garbage, and then checked the traps in the kitchen, and I noticed something was weird about one of them. The Cheetoh I had put in it on top of the peanut butter was free floating. That's not right at all, it should have been stuck to the peanut butter (I had opened a bag of Cheetohs from Derek's lunch stash specifically to bait these traps, because I thought giving them options of peanut butter and something crunchy would be nice), so I pick up the trap. The peanut butter was gone. Which is DEFINITELY not right. The trap is still closed, but half of the bait has disappeared. So I check the other five traps....they're all vacant, but they all have traces of mouse parties. Droppings, and tiny little paw claw marks on the sides of the traps where the peanut butter was stuck.
These crafty little fucking bastards.
They've figured out how to get in and out of the god damn humane mouse traps. So I've essentially been helping the god damn horde. No wonder they're not scared of me and Derek and feel bold enough to wander out while we're cooking. We fucking feed them. They like us. We are their benevolent god creatures.
I don't know what to do. I hate that my cat kills them, because I have to deal with the roller coaster loving carcasses, and as Allen mentioned, while Floopies is a prolific hunter, he's not going to be killing them fast enough to lighten the mouse load. I don't want to kill them. I cannot bear the thought of killing them. I will not do it.
So I'm going to buy a different kind of trap. Mice are very smart, and I've made mention of this to Derek a LOT, so I shouldn't be surprised that they've figured out how to get in and out of the traps that are now serving as their larders. I need a trap they can't get out of, so I'll have to order some on Amazon.
Poor little mice. :(
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