Shortly after my last post, I had a couple friends here visiting, and then right after they left my mom and her cats headed back down to the States. So within 2-3 days it went from 4 people and 3 cats in the house down to just me and Chloe. Chloe's been pretty stressed all summer because of all the moving and change and people coming in and out. She was getting kind of skittish and hostile even while we were still living in Toronto (of course, so was I...) but it got pretty bad over the summer. After the house cleared out we spent about 10 days unwinding and milling around and getting used to it just being the two of us again, but our settling-in process was sort of interrupted with a trip down to the States at the beginning of September.
It was a fantastic trip for me, but maybe not so great for Chloe and my mom's cats. Chloe and my mom's calico aren't exactly friendly and they had to share the house without us while we went out to California to visit family. They dealt with it, though, and after Chloe forgave me for leaving her we headed back up to the Island.
I'll be honest. Since we got back, I've done pretty much NOTHING but play computer games. Yesterday I never even got dressed. And my schedule has reverted back to a 3:30am bedtime and breakfast at noon. I keep trying to go to bed earlier, but... we've had mice. It's not the mice themselves that keep me up all night. It's Chloe. With the mice.
There was a mouse hole behind the refrigerator that's been there for years, and we've never seen any mice or any mouse droppings so we never bothered to do anything about it. But last week, mice suddenly started coming out from behind the fridge in the middle of the night. The first mouse came as a complete surprise to me -- seriously. I was sitting at the computer (of course), and Chloe showed up next to me and started playing with something. I thought she had brought over a toy for me to throw for her, which is our usual routine, but when I leaned down to pick it up I saw blood all over the carpet and realized it was a live mouse.
It was still pretty spry. She'd injured it, but not intentionally. She kept letting it go and it would start to run and then she'd hop after it and catch it again and pick it up in her mouth and carry it around. And this continued until I finally managed to grab it myself. I took it outside and released it in the yard, which in hindsight was probably not the greatest plan because if it didn't die it probably scurried right back into the house.
Anyway, I figured out it had come from behind the refrigerator because Chloe spent the rest of the night sitting there waiting for another one. And within 36 hours we'd repeated the whole experience with 2 more mice (though she's been getting better at catching them without hurting them and I've been getting better at taking them away from her). She was spending day and night in the middle of the kitchen floor staring at the fridge, and I was staying up all night with her, knowing that if she caught another one she'd try to bring it to me wherever I was (even if I was asleep in bed). I finally caved and went to bed one night while Chloe was still stalking the refrigerator, and was relieved the next morning to find her (and only her) on the bed with me -- not a mouse in sight. Until I came downstairs, and found a dead one on the living room floor. That afternoon, a friend came over and set out a couple mouse traps (the killing kind, I am sorry to say), and that night I heard a terrible *SNAP* and knew we'd caught another one. After that I moved Chloe's food and litter box upstairs and started closing off the kitchen at night.
So eventually, our contractor came over and boarded up the mouse hole for me. I left the traps out for a while (hoping for several reasons never to catch anything in a mouse trap ever again) and after 3 mouse-free days I put the traps away, brought Chloe's food back downstairs, opened up the kitchen again and went to bed early.
And about 15 minutes after I got in bed and turned out the light, I heard Chloe's "mouse squirk" (a series of short, high-pitched "blrrrps") from the hallway downstairs. Slightly concerned, but hoping for the best, I called, "Yyyes?… Chloe?… What's up?…" and was answered by more squirking from the staircase, and then the upstairs hallway. At that point I jumped out of bed, turned on the lights and went running into the hallway just in time to see Chloe, mouse in mouth, bounding back down the stairs. It took about another half hour of chasing (chasing the mouse with Chloe's assistance, chasing Chloe with the mouse in her mouth, keeping Chloe from chasing the mouse while trying to get him myself) before I finally caught it and, uh... released it outside. :P
So now I have NO idea where they're coming from, since the only visible mouse hole in the house has been boarded up, and neither does Chloe. She's back to sitting in front of the fridge all evening, even though I pulled the whole thing out to prove to her that there's no hole back there anymore. So I'm back to closing off the kitchen at night, and waiting to see where and when the next mouse will appear.
Meanwhile, Michael J. (the fox) has moved from one plum tree onto the second, and now the third, and I still see him almost every day. Last week he even came up on the deck and peeked in the windows at me. And I also suspect that either he or a skunk is eating the apples in the front yard. Not to be outdone by foxes or mice, there is also something living in the ceiling -- not the attic, not the chimney, no, the ceiling between the first and second floors. No idea what it is or how it's getting in and out of there, but... yeah. It's pretty creepy at 2am to hear something walking around above you when you know there's no one else in the house.
So that's what's been keeping me busy (or at least entertained) lately. Well, that and Oblivion. Somehow I have this funny feeling that I'm going to have a full menagerie this winter...
