Introducing Clara

As promised, I would like to share with you the finale of our Mouse Saga.  After the long, arduous, and less-than-fruitful chase over the course of nearly a month, the story has indeed come to its end.  With its end comes a new beginning, which can be summed up nicely in the following statements:

Our new cat is home.

The mouse is gone.

The two statements are unrelated.

Before regaling you with the story of our newest addition, I'll start with the mouse's exit.  We came home with Clara and followed her around as she began sniffing and exploring her new environment.  As we wandered into the kitchen, Tomm heard a noise and wondered if it had come from Clara.  Noticing her silence, he looked instead to the shelving unit which has been the central focus of our mouse hunt and there, in the selfsame basket as the one which started the whole debacle, was the mouse stuck pitifully on a glue pad!

After Monday morning's near-catch, I put one of the month-old glue pads into the basket figuring at least it wouldn't be any less successful there.  The mouse had done a good job of avoiding them for the last month but hey, what the hell.  That morning just before leaving for the shelter, the exterminator came by and threw a few poison packets behind the refrigerator and stove and gave me a handful of large sticky pads.  I wasn't terribly keen on the idea of poison, but something had to be done.

So imagine our surprise when we returned early in the afternoon to find the mouse trapped of its own accord on a little plastic dish of goo that had been sitting in our kitchen for weeks!  This is quite possibly the most anti-climactic ending I could have envisioned for the story. 

It's probably a good thing the mouse found it's way out just as Clara found hers in, because with all the attention she's claiming for herself there'd be none left to bother with the mouse!  She is a four-year-old Russian Blue who has been in at least two shelters over the last couple months.  I don't know much of her story before that, but she is very comfortable with people and is making herself at home quite nicely.  I should also mention that neither Tomm nor I have ever had a cat before, so this is a brand new experience for both of us.  I just hope we do it right!

The shelter had named her Gracey for no particular reason, so we spent the train ride home trying to think of our own name for her.  I started by thinking categorically and considered composers' names.  There aren't a whole lot of well-known classical female composers, but the first to pop into my mind was Clara Schumann, the wife of Robert Schumann.  While I enjoy Clara's strikingly beautiful music, I've never listed her among my favorites (like Tchaikovsky, Shostakovitch, or Brahms) because I've never performed her works or studied it in great detail.  I held the name in the back of my mind as we explored other options, some cute and reasonable, others funny and downright embarrassing for a cat.  At one point on the train, I said "Tush!  We could name her Tush!" Tomm smiled and at that moment a young religious Jewish man sitting across from us said "You do know what that means, don't you?"  "Yes, we do," I laughed.  I tried to convince him I knew my way around Jewish vocabulary, but I don't think he was convinced either of us were members of the Tribe.  Oh well.  

By the time we arrived at home the name Clara had been repeated numerous times, bobbing up to the surface like a ball in a pool between every new ball we threw in.  Ultimately, we decided that the little terrified cat inside the box Tomm carried was, in fact, Clara.  The composer, however, was merely the inspiration and not the true eponym.

After cautiously crawling out of the box, she spent a lot of time sniffing and exploring in between hiding under the bed.  I don't blame her, really.  Later that afternoon Tomm had to leave for a night shift at work (the first night of a full month with that schedule), and a few hours later I left to audition for a community orchestra in Manhattan.  I was a little concerned about leaving Clara alone, but when I returned the apartment was just as I had left it, complete with Clara meowing loudly in the hallway.  I imagined her saying "Why did you leave me?!" over and over again, so I spent the next number of hours curled up with her on the bed while I finished a book.  She enjoyed pawing and kneading the crocheted afghan on the bed and even held it securely by her teeth as she worked her paws, stretching and extending the claws then curling up the paw, right then left then left.  I hope that blanket can survive the gentle but consistent abuse.

When I finally went to sleep, I hoped that Clara might stay with me throughout the night, but I seem to have forgotten that cats are very much nocturnal animals.  With Clara, that means jumping off the bed once every hour and meowing loudly for my attention.  As a new parent I woke up every time, sometimes following her into the living room before returning to the bed where she joined me, if only momentarily.  At some point I'm sure I'll learn to tune out her chitter chatter, but as I strive to understand what she's trying to tell me I'm afraid to miss a single word.

It's only been a day and already I'm in love with this cute and quirky cat of ours, and I wouldn't be surprised if she became a regular feature of this blog.  I hope you won't mind!

The Mouse That Lived

It all started about one month ago when I reached for a granola bar from the basket I'd put them in only to find that one had been nibbled on, wrapper and all.  A Nature Valley Chocolate Peanut Butter crunchy bar with a corner conspicuously missing.  I tossed it in the garbage and decided not to fuss.  Maybe it was a one-time thing, I reasoned.  Besides, Tomm had had a few consecutive rough days at work and I saw no need to bring up yet another issue.

The next morning I checked the basket and again I found the unmistakable marks of a small rodent with an appetite for chocolate peanut butter granola bars.  Alright, I decided, now it's worth fussing over.  I put the unchewed bars in a Ziploc bag and left the evidence for Tomm to see.

(A few days later, I also noticed a small hole chewed through the Ziploc housing a few half-emptied bags of chocolate chips I'd saved for baking.  Sure enough, the mouse had gotten all the way to the chocolate and had torn through those bags as well.)

Action had to be taken, but having never had a mouse in my kitchen before I didn't quite know what to do.   I hemmed and hawed for a day until one night when Tomm was on call.  I walked into the kitchen, flipped on the light, and saw a small, gray blur scurry along the floor to the safety of the stove.  Now, I will tell you with complete honesty and not a hint of hubris that a mouse - even the idea of a mouse - does not frighten me in the least.  It doesn't creep me out, unnerve me, or scare. It doesn't even repulse me.  But when something moves very quickly in a place where you expect silence and stillness, it can make a person jump.  Once my brain calmed my rapidly beating heart, I decided to investigate.  With a flashlight in hand I scanned the spaces around the oven - behind it, on the side by the wall, and underneath.  Nothing (except a significant deposit of crud from goodness knows how many tenants before us).  I looked at the door under the oven housing the broiler pan and, girding myself with resolve, I got down on the floor.  Preparing the flashlight, I opened it slowly.  There, caught in the beam, was a pair of tiny black eyes sunk into a fuzzy face.  We stared at one another for a few seconds.  I made the mistake of breaking contact first to look for something to catch it, and when I looked back a second later it had vanished swiftly into the night.  Or, more likely, into the wall.

I sat on the floor of the kitchen determined to catch it that night.  I had taken a long nap that day and as far as I was concerned nothing could deter me from keeping a night-long vigil.  I heard scratching sounds from the wall and thought certainly the mouse would try to come back and there I would be, ready and waiting for it to appear.  Of course, I also realized that a trap might work better than my own reflexes, so I looked up some ideas online and found a rather simple but ingenious (and humane) trap suggestion.  I set it up with some granola bar bits as bait and, confident it would work, went to sleep somewhere around 3:00 am.

As I'm sure you've guessed, the trap was worthless.  We tried it on a couple of other nights, and it was equally worthless every time.  So the next day we went to buy some "real" mouse traps.  Standing in the isle at the 99 cent store, we were faced with two main choices: spring-loaded killing machines, or sticky pads of punishment.  We decided to try out the sticky pads first, and we strategically placed four of them around the kitchen.  After a couple days, we hadn't caught a mouse but we also didn't see any signs of the mouse's presence.  Even if we weren't getting rid of the problem, we figured that the problem was rid of us and so we were placated.

Of course, this was only temporary.

Signs of the  mouse reappeared a week later in the form of bread and bagels gnawed on through their plastic bags.  We moved the sticky pads around, baited them a little, tried the trash can trap again, all to no avail.  One day I caught the mouse scurrying again.  The last straw, though, was when we set the table for dinner last week and noticed a few small and rather unsavory brown bits on the otherwise clean plates.  This mouse had to go.

I bought the spring loaded death machines the next day and set them with peanut butter around the kitchen.  Nothing.  I tried arranging it in the basket (which no longer held granola bars) with a slice of bread.  The mouse just ate half of the bread. And then last Friday as I was baking a cake for Shabbat dinner, I needed to get some ingredients from the shelf of the linen closet that we had reserved as a pantry space. I opened the door just in time to see the mouse sitting on the middle of the shelf amid bags of pasta, beans, flour, and sugar before it ran to the back and disappeared.  Oh goodness, the damage it had done.  It had found its way into all the pasta and, to my dismay, both of the bags of chocolate chips I had bought to replace the ones I had to throw out before.  It left behind partially-chewed remnants of packaging as well as its own little "gifts," all of which I cleaned out.  There was no sign of the mouse anywhere else in that closet, but I moved one of the death traps to that shelf (after putting all the food in a Rubbermaid container) and added a chocolate chip to the peanut butter that was still on the release from days earlier.  In fact, I sprinkled chocolate chips on and around the other two traps as well, thinking surely I would catch it this time.

The rest of that afternoon, the mouse started getting ballsy.  I would sit at the computer and see a slow movement out of the corner of my eye.  Was that a dust bunny that just blew in the corner?  Nope, that was the mouse's tail disappearing behind a box in the living room.  Moved the couch, and the mouse sprinted from it to the other wall.  Go to where it had gone and suddenly there was no sign of it.  Back to the computer.  A little later, I saw the mouse go into the kitchen.  Followed it.  Nothing.  All afternoon that mouse crept around the apartment, running mousy circles around me, taunting me with every pass from the pantry to the living room to the kitchen.  It was Hide and Go Seek, and the mouse was winning.  At one point I saw it sitting in the hallway in front of the entrance to the kitchen, looking at me.  I swear I caught it sneering at me before vanishing into the kitchen for the third time that afternoon.

I began to feel like the little, neurotic chef from Ratatouille, convinced I was seeing a rodent who was doing its very best to trick me into believing exactly the opposite.

The next evening we checked the traps.  Nearly all the chocolate chips were gone, but the trap was otherwise untouched.  I blamed myself for not really sticking the chips into the peanut butter, so it must have been pretty easy for the mouse to grab without setting off the trap.  I reset them, this time truly embedding the chocolate chip, certain that now if the mouse wanted the chocolate, the act of wresting it out of the thick peanut butter would lead to its demise.

When we checked the traps again on Sunday night, we had decidedly reached the final final straw (all those other final straws were merely precursors).  Not only did the chocolate chip disappear from each trap, BUT THE PEANUT BUTTER WAS COMPLETELY GONE AS WELL!  The mouse had strategically gnawed, chewed, and licked the traps clean of all food, all without tripping the trigger on a single one.  Oh ho ho, little mousy.  Well done.  I'll give you that.

At this point Tomm and I decided we should invite the exterminator to take care of the problem professionally, but we don't have the direct number for our building's exterminator who comes twice a month, and the super wasn't around all day Sunday.  He didn't return my call on Monday, either.  But around 1:30 on Monday morning I was awoken from my slumber with sounds of a disturbance in the kitchen.  I thought I heard a SNAP, but then I heard a few more similar sounds and realized we simply didn't have that many traps set out.  I heard a little more rustling and went to investigate.

I turned the light on in the kitchen and nothing moved.  I checked all the spots I would normally see the mouse before it ran, and it wasn't anywhere.  I looked in the pantry and found nothing.  Back in the kitchen, I heard a rustling again and looked down to find the mouse desperately trying to hide behind the leg of a metal shelving unit with one of the old sticky traps on its back.  FINALLY!  I went toward it and held it down by the black plastic of the pad while it continued to try frantically to escape.  How would I actually get it, I wondered?  I couldn't pick it up with my bare hands, and I simply could not bring myself to squish it.  This mouse had caused trouble and eaten my food, sure, but it was still a living, breathing, terrified little creature and I didn't have the resolve to just kill it on my own.

I was shaken out of my existential crisis by the mouse who managed to pull away from me toward the back of the refrigerator.  The trap on its back kept it from moving away entirely, but it pulled and dislodged itself partially from the sticky pad, attached now only by its tail.  Oh no!  I had to find something to catch it with, hold it in, and when I went back to the mouse and tried pulling it toward me with the sticky pad, it pulled free completely and was gone.

I had practically held the mouse in the palm of my hand and it got away!  It left patches of fur on the sticky pad but it was alive and presumably still planning on returning.  I waited around in the kitchen for a while longer with a flashlight and a large bowl, hoping to trap it should I see it again, but my impatience and fatigue got the better of me and, defeated, I humbly sulked back to bed.

I'm still hoping to hear back from the super, but in the meantime we're getting a cat.  We're very excited about getting a pet and we're certainly not looking specifically for a mouser, but if this cat happens to gift me a lifeless rodent, I won't be disappointed.

Besides, I hear mousy heaven has plenty of chocolate chips.