ha ha ha, yes, very funny.
I was sitting on my living room floor getting ready to watch the second half of The Lifetime! Summer! Movie! Event! starring Sarah Chalke (don't judge me!) and sorting through a pile of crapola that has accumulated next to my side of the sofa. I had a trash bag in front of me piling in the junk mail and a basket next to me for putting the things that just need to be put away. Library books, hand cream, nail polish, knitting implements.
Marge comes trotting in from the kitchen and drops something on the floor and stands there. I check the progress on the fast forwarding on the tv (I need to skip the first half of the mini series and they showed it all in one fell swoop) and look at Marge. I think "wow, that's a big ball of lint he brought me" Marge brings me things all the time. His dolly head, cat toys, nice bits of lint, anything he loves he usually wants to share with me. He trots in and drops them where I can see them and then hangs out with me for a while, then hops down and picks up his treasure and trots away with it. It's sweet, really. Usually.
"Wait. a. minute.....oh jesus..that lint has legs."
It's not as sweet when his treasure is something that used to be a living creature.
I don't like mice, who does, really? I'm not terrified of mice, I figure they are kind of a fact of life. I know they rule the detached garage (and we know they looooove sunflower seeds) and I think by having three cats it's a fair warning to mice that there is nothing in my house that will probably be worth it. Marge is not fast, but he is relentless once he catches something. Erma is a grey streak of lightning and is cracked out around 95% of her life. Elvis is probably scared of the mice but he is a very powerful and large cat and woe be unto the mice that he catches. He breaks them fast. And then shits in the middle of the floor.
The Man put the air conditioners in the windows last weekend and I was pretty sure I heard some squeaks coming from the one in the kitchen and hoped whatever was in it would choose to exit to the outdoors. Then the cats became a little bit obsessed with staring under the fridge, which is never a good sign.
I have been keeping my eyes peeled, but not freaking out about it. Mice don't freak me out too bad.
Unless they are dead, and then they really really bother me. Which makes no sense, I know.
So anyway, marge has dropped a very dead mouse about eighteen inches away from my foot and it sat there for a good fve minutes before I noticed it, until Marge started talking to it and trying to scoot it along the carpet and play with it.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!
I jumped up off the floor and got on the sofa and hollered to my husband who was already in bed for about a half hour. Somehow he has ended up as The Remover of Dead Things in this household. I have ended up as The Remover of Live Things and over the years I have had to rid our various living spaces of live mice, ants, dozens of small slugs from a concrete slab front porch in a student rental house (I used a slug-only spatula and flung them into the yard), the squirrel stuck in the pipe in the basement, spiders galore, a 6 inch banana slug from the bathroom floor of a shitty basement apartment and last week I managed to catch a freaking BEE with my pink silicon tipped extra long BBQ tongs, open the kitchen window and release him back into the wild without breaking a wing. I know, I was amazed myself. It was a HUGE bee. Go bees.
He has removed....mice. A mouse from the iced tea pitcher and one from the toilet in one hideous apartment, both discovered by me, both dead when discovered. Wet little slobbered on, broken back mice that we had to pry away from the cats. That one mouse I flattened in the middle of the night with a 3 inch thick Java language text after Marge had broken it but it was still running in a circle and screaming (much to the cat's delight!) and I took pity and ended it. It was perfectly flat, though. It was kind of awesome, in a hideous and grim way.
So tonight he came down, half asleep thinking I was telling him the cat had gotten out. And I was somehat agitated by the time he got down here. See, with a live mouse, you know they are going to run like hell. With a dead one, what if it's NOT dead and you get close to it and GOTCHA! it's not dead and it...umm...gets you?
That is my fear. Which is just ridiculous.
But he asked me what happened and I told him. And he laughed at me.
He laughed at me when i said I jumped up on the couch and called him down. He said I was becoming a stereotype (really computer programmer wearing shorts with dark socks and a Doctor Who t-shirt? REALLY?) and then he laughed as got a wad of papertowels and picked up a stiff little 2 inch mouse carcass and threw it away (OMG no, it has to go all the way to the outside garbage buggies! You can't put it in the kitchen trash!) came back in, went to the bathroom and chuckled while he washed his hands and went back to bed.
Maybe I should not have mocked him so harshly about the bunnies?
nah, that shit is still hilarious.