We've been re-doing the bathrooms, as the one toilet room downstairs was desperately boring and the family bathroom upstairs didn't have a shower. It also had a toilet that leaked foul nasty shit all over the floor when you flushed it and deep blue plush carpets that made me want to fall down on them and weep, only I was too afraid of what had come out of the toilet and on to it to touch the thing. So fixing the bathrooms became a priority and the graft that we've been working on for the past few weekends.

Huge progress has been made-the downstairs bog is now a purply color that I love. The upstairs bathroom has had a major overhaul-although we didn't rip it all out and refit it as we're rebuilding in a year or so, we did fix the toilet, rip out the carpet, install wood floors, install both a hand-held and a standing shower (with a shower head the size of a dinner plate!) and the whole place got painted a refreshing light green.

But it was during the process that it happened.

The start of the period now to be known as The Troubles.

It was horrible, absolutely horrible. I couldn't believe it, and the whole world seemed to move in slow motion. We had to pull together hard as a couple in our relationship in order to make it through.

Right in the middle of laying the flooring in the bathroom, I looked up from my position on the floor, and happened to see, there in the middle of our hallway, a mouse.

A mouse.

In our hallway.

A brown mice about half the length of my hand.

In our hallway.

I went from thinking in slow motion to quick motion as I hurtled myself into the bathtub, as though someone had just swung something that hit the floor with a solid chunk before shouting 'Incoming!' What came out of my mouth happened just as fast as an explosion. Angus looked up into the hallway and regarded our vermin friend.

'Ahhhh'¦.he's really cute,' Angus coos.

Cute my ass. Although the mouse may be cute, with twitchy whiskers and tiny little feet, I couldn't think of it as a mouse. Oh no. I know mice are cute. Birds are cute, too, but they are also diseases packaged in something pretty. I am someone who suffers from a germ phobia, so these creatures, they are like the spawn of satan wrapped in big brown-eyed cuteness. Instead of seeing a little mouse in our hallway, all I could see was THE PLAGUE. That's right. Mice may be cuddly but they are only pestilence packaged in tiny fur form. Stuart Little could be carrying the Black Death. This boil brought to you courtesy of Beatrix Potter's Johnny Town-Mouse. Want some Hantavirus? Just ask our boy Mickey over there.

The mouse continued to tool around our hallway with absolutely no care in the world. And why should he care? I only had two housecats 6 feet away in either direction. One of them was in the guest room, the other was in our room'¦and from where I was in the bathroom I could hear her snoring. Our two killer responsive cats couldn't even be dealing with the new tourist in our house.

I freak out about the mouse. We keep a clean house with no food hanging around, so I didn't understand what he's doing whistling through our hallway. Angus shrugged. 'It's an old house, Helen. Old houses have mice.'

We were about 10.5 seconds away from packing up and moving to a new build, when my sense of stubbornness kicked in.

At the end of my shouting, Angus was just calm. I nabbed the little guy in a blue trash can and insisted we walk him to a field and let him go. Angus wanted to let him go outside the front door but I reasoned that he'd just get back in again. I'd rather he live and have the option to be an outdoor or an indoor mouse, preferably of one of our neighbors' homes. We walk him to the field to let him go.

'Ahhhh'¦he's really cute,' Angus reiterates.

As we see his little tail slip through the foliage, I agree that he is really cute.

And then we go inside and I work to refrain from hitting the areas he touched with a blow torch, because nothing kills infection like an inferno.

-H.

PS-for Anh who asked, and I can never resist showing off the little guy, especially when he blinks.

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 05:34 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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