Murderer!

Well, I no longer have a mouse in my garage. Or, I should say, I no longer have a LIVE mouse in my garage. For some time we have known there was a little guy loose in there. I had a bag of dog food that developed holes in it -- despite my clever attempt to keep bugs out by putting the bag inside a plastic bin -- when the mouse just climbed right over the edge and chowed down. So the Orkin guy gave me some traps with poison in them. He says "they're pet safe, because they work on [something to do with vitamin K or some such] which your pets get from their food." Great. But the mouse is EATING my pet's food. (FYI I got a new container -- plastic this time with a lid -- for the dog food and did not feed them from the mouse diner!) Or pet food in general. So the poison is clearly not going to work on him until we get rid of this huge (and heavy) bag of food. So I did...I threw away the bag, the plastic container, the carpet strip from the garage that we had used to wipe dirty shoes on...the works. And it's not that I mind mice. Mice are cute, but they leave a MESS! There was a trail of mouse excrement EVERYWHERE! So mousy had to go. I was hoping that maybe he was IN the pet food, container, etc. when I threw it away and could therefore just travel on to the dump in high style and with enough food to probably last him the rest of the year. But then yesterday I noticed that there was an odd smell in the garage. It was still there when I came home from work today, and I looked at one of the traps and thought I saw a tail. Figuring I was hallucinating, I looked closer, and there was a little mousy corpse just outside the trap. All cute and little and grey-brown. With the tail. Now, he was supposed to die IN the trap (or that was my understanding), but he didn't...he went outside the trap, so now I have to exhume his little body from the garage and dispose of him. Anyway...so hopefully no more mouse mess, but now I feel guilty because he's dead.