Quiet Please, the Mice Are Sleeping

We live in an old farmhouse on acreage. We have a field; the field has blackberries. The blackberries are a commune for field mice. The field mice occasionally discover our laundry room and mistakenly think it's a 5-star hotel.

We also have two cats, both FIV- positive rescues. One cat (Amber) is from outer space and simply arrived one day, asking to rent a room in exchange for work around the house. This alien is quite useful as we only see her every couple of days; the other (Joshua) is from the streets of Philly and showed up with torn ears, the worst breath we have ever encountered and believes he has found Nirvana in the Gunnels residence. He is, at any given time, sitting on a family member and requesting food.

So the alien, in exchange for room rent, rids the house of unwanted field visitors. The street cat typically watches the alien working and says, "Better you than me, Sister. Now where's my tuna?"

We can hear Amber skipping through the house at night every so often, playing keepaway with some poor shmuck of a mouse who was only looking for late-night room service. And then, in true cat fashion, she deposits the rodent directly in the path of anyone heading the bathroom in the middle of the night. However, on one occasion, she chose to place the "sleeping" mouse inside the shoe of the preteen daughter who also lives here, apparently believing that this is what Earthlings enjoy discovering right before school.

Thankfully, I found it before daughter did, thus saving piercing screams and expensive therapy. I was unable to write about this incident at the time because the kids do read my blog and I figured daughter would never wear the shoes, or possibly ANY shoes, for the rest of her life and frankly they were brand-new shoes. I couldn't resist finally telling her, though, and by this time she was able to laugh about it.

I noticed she hasn't worn those shoes yet, though.