In Which I Am A Total Wimp...And Don't Care One Bit.

Most of the time, I love our apartment. I even listed it as the best thing about living where I do not too long ago. And I really do love it; we are spoiled rotten by all the space, our rent is more than reasonable for the area, and the location is super convenient for both of us (I only have a five minute walk, and Preston doesn't even have to go OUTSIDE to get to work). We have huge windows, wood floors...really. We're spoiled.

However, as a very, very old building, living here is, of course, a double edged sword. Turns out that buildings built in 1880 weren't so cutting edge on the whole "air-circulation" thing, which means our apartment is perpetually covered with a film of dust, to which I am allergic. Awesome. Also, our bathroom is roughly the size of a postage stamp, all of our pipes are on the outside of the wall (because all of the walls are stone), and we cannot control our heat, which means that we both wear shorts and a t-shirt around the apartment in January. But the WORST part of living in such an old building is, without a doubt, the mice.

Now, I'm a pretty clean person. Pictures such as this one might suggest otherwise. But aside from my apparent allergy to putting my clothes away, ever, and our tendency to leave used glasses and mugs all over the apartment until we look in the cabinets and think WTF. WHY DIDN'T THE FAIRIES COME??? AGAIN??? Aside from those two nasty habits, I'm pretty clean. To the point of obsessive compulsiveness. So it is to my deepest annoyance that we have mice. This year, on the advice of a former resident, in addition to putting out sticky traps, I doused the apartment in peppermint oil, which has very successfully repelled the mice, if I can remember to apply to it every few days or so (in order to keep the scent strong). Of course, I cannot remember to apply it every few days, and we've had our share of mice this winter.

About a month ago, however, I was on my way out the door when something behind the desk caught my eye. Upon realizing that it was a dead mouse in a trap, I immediately screamed BLOODY MURDER, and shut myself in the bedroom with the dogs. I put the dogs up, wrote this note to Preston, and got ready to hurry out of the apartment as soon as I possibly could. Then, however, I got all fancy and over-confident, and thought, OK. Mary Frances. You are a BIG KID. You can DO THIS. Just go get a paper bag, a dustpan, and take the mouse down to the trash. YOU CAN DO IT. So I got my materials together, proud at just how BRAVE I was being, and readied myself to dispose of the mouse ALL BY MY BIG KID SELF. I was just about to lightly brush the mouse (caught in the trap, still) into the paper bag, when all of a sudden IT MOVED, and I realized it wasn't a dead mouse at all, but in fact a very much ALIVE mouse. At which point I screamed bloody murder yet again,emended my note to Preston (see a bigger version here), taped it to the door, and bolted. And I had NO SHAME.