The mouse is dead. Long live the mouse.

_{These are no ordinary varmints}

Yesterday, we enjoyed a nice long hike amongst the blooming cherry orchards of the Black Forest. I took many, many, beautiful photos, and the exercise was much-needed after the filling Bretagne-style crêpes still filling our stomachs from Saturday’s dinner. We then had a lovely four-way conversation over Skype with friends from Vancouver, Halifax and London.

In short, it was lovely weekend, and should have been made all the more when I discovered that one of our traps (the conventional kind, located in our pantry) had lured one of our miniature houseguests to its death.* While sad that it had not survived to fall prey to my jury-rigged mouse-o-matic (pictured below) I was glad that our long nightmare was over, and that we could stop living like refugees in our own home.

Fast-forward several hours… to four o’clock in the morning. Amynah shakes me awake:
“Fu..wah?” I articulated.
“Mark… I think I hear the mouse.”
“Buh…” I replied, and then lay quiet, as the scrabbling behind the wall signaled to me, in rodent-Morse, that this was not over, buddy.

Maybe it’s a ghost?

Anyway, Mark's mouse-o-matic (patent pending) is once again up and running, in the hopes that the peanut butter fumes wafting into the walls will somehow cause my nemesis to become much stupider than the evidence to date suggests it is.

_{* We interred the deceased immediately, as demanded for by rodent funereal custom, so I am afraid I cannot satisfy certain people’s macabre desire for trophy photos.}