I refuse to call this post, "A Sticky Situation"

Our house has a rodent problem. For a long time it was a rodent "issue:" it was occasionally heard scratching around in the pantry walls, witnessed once or twice racing from between the kitchen and pantry, but basically keeping to itself. We set snap traps and a live trap every once in a while, caught one, and set it free by the creek.

Realizing what pansies we were, the mouse returned with friends. Suddenly brazen, despite the cat we started letting into the house, the mice started chewing through cardboard containers of food previously left alone. We had been advised by an exterminator to stuff the many holes in the wall with steel wool and cover them with metal plates, but we started finding bits of chewed up steel wool about the pantry! Bits of insulation, too. They ventured into other rooms, and the last straw was when teeny holes started showing up in our clothing.

I was the one to suggest sticky traps, and then went so far as to buy them and give them to the house as a gift. Despite bordering on veganism, I have no problem killing an animal that annoys me and is risking the health of my friends and family. Killing an animal for food or sport? Barbaric. Killing an animal eating my food? Perfectly reasonable.

I put the traps out last week and waited for the dark day we'd catch one and have to put it out of its misery. Days passed without incident. Fast forward to yesterday at six a.m. I dragged myself out of bed and to the dresser to discover that the clean clothes were still in the dryer. Putting on mismatched socks and my glasses, I groggily stumbled down the stairs and into the pantry. As has become my habit, I flipped on the light with an eye towards the traps. Crossing the room, I could see that one of the traps had been moved.

Weird. Someone mentioned hearing something in the attic, did they...

At that point, I became aware of two things: the first was a consistent, quiet, shrill shrieking noise. The second was that something was on my foot.

IT was on my FOOT. The mouse was on my FOOT. It was GLUED TO MY FOOT. The mouse was on a glue trap, and my foot was on a glue trap, and we were both screaming bloody murder. I kicked and screamed, and screamed, and screamed some more. I would still be screaming if I hadn't narrowly decided to wear mismatched socks for that two minute trek downstairs, if that glue trap were still attached to the ball of my foot. Instead my sock, the trap, and the mouse suddenly flew across the room and into the wall, and I raced upstairs to crawl back into bed with Darling and tell him to get up, get our laundry, make coffee, and make the mouse disappear so I could regain my sanity in order to catch the train up to north Austin for babysitting.

The moral of the story? Always wear socks. And if you put a glue trap in your home, don't expect karma to go easy on you.