the neverending story

What should I find under our chaise lounge this morning, but a LIVE mouse stuck to a sticky pad trap!!



He actually squeeked, which really helped because otherwise I never would've checked that trap. And then he'd die and stink up the house...yet again.



It's like the mouse is Mario and he has so many lives so when one dies, he just pops up again. I'm too terrified to touch the trap so I'm waiting for Loren to get back from helping with Angel Food. Hopefully he's on his way now.



The mouse is still moving, so it must have JUST happened before I found him.



I don't think housing realizes that this isn't just one mouse...that we have a family of them living in the walls. That they keep reproducing!



I blogged about this on myspace but a housing guy came out about a month ago and sprayed this insullating foam in two places where we thought the mice might be getting in. We called housing to complain because we didn't think that was going to do ANY good whatsoever. They called the Cook's guy. Who came and put down two poison traps. But they're not traps...they don't actually catch the mice. The trap allows the mouse to go in, eat the poison, then get right back out...and find a place to die!! In turn, WE have to find the mouse once we realize that there's a putrid smell.

My concern is that after Loren leaves for Afghanistan, I'll be dealing with this all by myself, and almost in my third trimester.

I don't know how I'd go about doing this, but I want to confront housing on the issue. I want to tell them that they had better move us into a new house or else. And I don't know what the "or else" is, but I just don't see how it's right that we have to deal with this. If we lived off-post, we'd be receiving $802 for housing. As it is, Loren does get paid that money, but housing automatically takes it from his paycheck. So basically, we're paying them $802 for a two bed, one bath crappy house and there's not much we can do about it.

It makes me wonder if we were living in an apartment somewhere that had this mouse problem, what would they be doing about it? Would they just set poison out and say, "Here you go, hope you can find and get to all the dead ones."

And if it were something we were doing wrong, I could understand it. It would be our problem to fix it. But all we're doing is living in this stink hole. Minding our own business. And we can't say anything to housing until Monday because they're closed for the weekend.

I'm at a loss as to what else we're supposed to be doing here. And the thing is, if we were to go on vacation for a week...or even a weekend, and we came back to that stench, we'd have to search and search for where the dead mouse was. WE shouldn't have to do that. I'm sorry, but I think this is a crappy arrangement.

I could be saying, "Well, it could be worse, we could be homeless or live in a 3rd world country."

But the fact of the matter is, we aren't homeless, we don't live in a 3rd world country...we live in America, on an ARMY POST, and this is how the military treats its own. It's sad.