Okay, first off, the saga of the garden...
SomeTHING got onto the deck and munched a bunch of my plants over the course of a few days. First, I sprinkled cayenne pepper over everything. Nope. Then I mixed up a batch of my Rat-B-Gone (peppermint, cloves, and cedar essential oils). Nope. I tried putting up a length of fencing around my tastiest plants, too, but whatever it was climbed right over or went through the spacing. Sunday, I moved all my plants inside - half in the garage, half in the sunroom. And I ordered a small (5x5x6.5 roughly) greenhouse from Amazon. That'll be here Thursday and it's supposedly pretty easy to put together. I also bought a game camera to keep an eye on everything. Fingers crossed.
The plants that got munched... Of my trees: my baby black cherry, my little persimmon, one hickory, three redbuds, and a dogwood are all sticks now. My buckthorn has two little leaves left about 2" up. The other hickory has been halved. Of my produce: all 4 green pepper plants are sticks, one of my fingerling potatoes is sticks, my best pots of carrots had about 2/3rds of the greenery munched off and the other two that were doing well also saw munching. The one carrot pot that only had a few carrots coming up only has one now. Thankfully, it left Pedro Potato and the Tomato Trio alone.
Okay, so I've got a fix for that on the way. One would think I'd be done with critter mayhem, right? Umm, no.
Last night, about 1:30 a.m., I hear the scrabble of claws on vinyl flooring. And it's not the usual sound of the cats chasing each other. I turn to Hubs, but he's not in bed. None of the lights are on, so I figure he's on a bathroom break. The noise has stopped, but that doesn't mean anything in a house with cats, so I get up to go see what the hell is up with The Boyz. I wander into the kitchen to find Finn intently staring at the space under the catfood cupboard. I get a flashlight and shine it under there. Nothing. But he won't be swayed. We keep a cooler next the cupboard so the cats can jump up there easily. I move the cooler. MOUSE. He was terrified and I was stunned, so we just looked at each other for a minute. He recovered first and took off, followed closely by Finn.
Did Finn catch him? No. The little bastard ran along the wall, across the space by the front door, and I lost sight of it. Finn didn't. He started circling Hubs' recliner like a hound who'd run a fox to ground.
By then, Hubs had come out to see what the hell was going on. We upended the recliner. Couldn't see it. I tried beating on the recliner, but no sign of it. We eventually found it on the other end of the room behind the shelf I keep our TV on. Haha! thinks I, we've got it trapped.
Nope. We tried to get it, but it skittered away, ran down the wall, and went into my recliner. So there we were trying to get it out of my recliner. Not a sign of the damn thing.
For some reason, at that point... it being now 2:30 and me being me... I decided to check behind the TV again. Sure enough, the little bastard had slipped by us and was back where it thought it was safe. I put sticky traps on either side of the shelving and we debated on how best to get the little bastard out of there, both of watching to make sure it didn't escape again. At one point, I checked and it was still there. More debating. Checked again. Would you believe it, the little fucker was gone.
At this point, we had both cats locked up in the office because we didn't need them underfoot, especially considering that Hubs was prepared to whack the little shit with a shovel, and we didn't want the cats to get in the middle of that. Since the cats were put away, I went around laying sticky traps and snap traps all over the living room. I made coffee and we plopped down in front of the TV to both settled down enough to go back to bed and to see if we caught the furry bastard before going to sleep.
It was around 4am when we went back to bed with no mouse caught. I got up at 6:30 with still no mouse. We finally put all the traps away and let the cats out at 8 with no success. We did, however, kill a mouse in the garage last night. Not the same mouse. The dead one was lighter than the marauder.
Neither of us has any clue as to how the furry bugger got in the house. I've spent untold time over the years plugging every damn hole that would allow ingress for mice. It's been years, in fact, since we saw one inside the house. More investigating will occur, but not now. I'm bushed. I leave it to the cats to find it and kill it, if it shows its twitchy little nose again.
Unfortunately, Finn did not show prowess at killing the mouse last night and Sawyer, when given the chance, was terrified at the prospect. I'm revoking their cat cards until they prove their worth.
Between the mysterious plant-muncher (packrat, I assume) and the nighttime visitor, I'm about 75% wondering what I did to piss Nature off, because I think she's staging a revolt. Pray for our safety. There are more of them than there are of us and we're getting to old for this shit.
