A tale of Mice and Men (and one dog)

I love where I live. We are close to town, close to all things necessary, yet we have a little land, which gives us the somewhat false feeling of being alone in the woods. On any given day I can look out my living room window and see anything from half a dozen deer walking behind our house, to 25 turkeys tormenting my dogs, to a hawk or a piliated woodpecker sitting in one of the hundreds of trees we have. There is, however, a down side. Mice. Not a mouse, but mice. Plural. It started when we moved in. Signs of mice in the storage room. For 2 years, that was the only place we ever saw them. Every now and then we would hear my husband yelling, “got a customer!”, and we knew he had caught another one. Then there was the day that I found a half – dead mouse on the floor of my office, but since my office is next to the storage room, we still were lulled into thinking they were confined to that area of the basement. That is, until the other day. I was putting clothes away in my daughter’s room, only to notice that our little cairn terrier, who is the poster child for obsessive compulsive disorder, was pointing the corner of my daughter’s room.  The more we watched her, the more we realized that she was fixated on a critter of some sort.  It was then that my daughter informed me that Minnie had been there all night the night before growling at the corner.  Sure enough, on closer inspection, there was a hole big enough in the baseboard for a mouse.  Half an hour later we heard Minnie start to growl again – only this tim, by the time we got in there, she had torn a hole the size of a baseball into the carpet trying to dig for the pesky critter.  Since then, we have had various mouse appearances throughout the basement.  Last night Marty, my hubby, informed me that he could hear them through the wall of his upstairs office.  I now have traps with cheese set in every duct in the house practically, and am afraid that if we don’t find their door to the house they will soon outnumber us and take over my otherwise very peaceful world.  So just know that if you don’t hear from me again, the mice are in control.