In addition to everything else I have to deal with lately, I also have mice in my laundry room. They’ve eaten an entire box of ramen noodle packets and ripped their way into a box of snack mix packets (which I have since thrown away). I have the exterminator coming every week to check the traps, but so far no mouse has been caught. They’re driving my dog crazy, too; she can hear them in the floor and the wall, scrabbling around.

Well, now they’re mocking me.

When I came home from my work trip I noticed that one of the traps in my laundry room had been tripped, but there was no mouse in it. Okay, fine; maybe something fell on it.

But last Friday I went into my laundry room to throw something away (I keep the trash in there so the dog doesn’t knock it over) and I found a trap sitting in the middle of my laundry room floor, untripped, the bait gone.

I guess it’s time to up my game and have the exterminator put down poison. I have nothing against mice, really, but I don’t have the money to repair anything they damage in my house. I’m lucky my metamour was able to fix my washing machine when they chewed through the wires.

Partner 2 suggested I get a cat. Pretty sure my dog would not approve of that. I don’t dislike cats, by the way; I just dislike cleaning cat litter, and after more than a decade of that with my first wife (during which time she almost never cleaned the litter when it was her turn) I have no desire to get back into doing it.