One Great Big Mousehole

We've got mice.

No, I know it's not surprising considering we're bordered on three sides by wheat fields, we've just pulled up the entire floor in two rooms making it one great big mousehole, and The Kids think that popcorn is best enjoyed through the soles of their feet (one for me, one for the carpet fairies).

I'm a pseudo-country girl - that means I always lived in country towns without every having to actually feed anything, grow anything or muck out behind anything (until I had kids that is).
I know mice are normal in the country - like lice in kindergarteners, no one talks about them but they're there and whether you use Quellada or pumpkin-seed-and-chocolate-baited traps - you're really not making a dent in the population, you're just redirecting it to the corner behind the stove where there's over-flowed pasta (or, in keeping with the metaphor, to that feral kid down the block).

In fact - if you believe in Darwinism, you're actually improving the species.
Kill off the dumb ones, the naive ones, the greedy ones, and leave just the smart ones to breed.
It explains all that footage in old Australian docos where you watch the mouse tight-rope along the string and drag the stick of Metwurst up into nibbling range.
It's an Uber-Mouse.
Either that or it's one of Mrs Frisby's Rats of NIMH!

So, we've got mice.
And while I pride myself on my innate anti-girliness I am, just now, sitting here blogging to the flamenco beat of mousetraps going off like a 21-gun-salute two rooms over in the kitchen.
And I'm NOT going in to finish off the dishes.
Not tonight.

My Man will, in the morning, dispose of their little furry corpses and pretend he doesn't think it's funny that I squirm at the idea of unlocking their little bodies from their wire and willow death-traps.
It's not that I won't empty a mousetrap, or that I can't.
It's just that after 10 years of ups and downs and both of us pretending to be independent but just becoming more and more twined around each other - filling in each other's least-favourite jobs by handing over one of our own - I've decided that manly mouse-disposal is one of those 'ups'.

He told me himself, last night, that he was happy to do it - as long as I continued in my role as spider-killer-in-chief.
Ever seen a grown man squeal like a little girl?
Well, yes I have, but that's actually another story.
While I'd surely take literary advantage of it if The Man danced on the spot like Jennifer Beal in Flashdance every time he saw a spider, the truth is I didn't even know about his phobia for, oooh, maybe three years.
I was leaving the shower of the old farmhouse we were living in, towel-wrapped, and in a truly sexist but off-hand way asked him to get rid of the spider in the bath.
His reply was short and succinct.
'No.'
Not 'Can't you do it yourself?' or 'I'm busy' - just a frozen, definite 'No'.
I don't tease him often about it, especially now that The Girl has inherited the phobia (or absorbed it like Osmosis), but I think he enjoys the quiet smugness of cleaning up my little rodent victims.

At least I hope he does.
Because there's two more waiting for him right now on either side of a day's worth of dishes.