So, just as our living room had pretty much finally lost its stench, after ten thousand scrubbings of the mouse-molested couch...

Yesterday, while sitting in the end room (with the door to the living room standing open), I thought I heard a scuttling noise. Nah, it's just the wind, I told myself. Then a little dark shape flashed in the corner of my vision.

Yup. We have a new mouse. And worse yet, he has absolutely no sense of discretion. I was sitting on the futon in the endroom. Maya was lying (snoring) beside me. And the dratted mouse spent all afternoon exploring the floor in front of us! It got to the point where I actually made some serious attempts to trap him with a shoebox. No luck - he was way too fast. But he still didn't leave the room! He just stayed out of reach. Okay, he was admittedly cute - little and brown with big ears and a non-stop-sniffing nose - but by the time he'd been scuttling around in front of me for well over an hour, the cuteness no longer affected me. He had turned into That Bloody Mouse! Even if he'd just had the decency to stay in another room, I could have coped better. But really, he had no sense of basic courtesy. As he scuttled around, investigating (and probably peeing on) all of our books, I nudged snoring Maya awake.

"Look!" I said. "Look, Maya! A mouse!"

She looked. She looked back at me. Her expression clearly said: "Yes? And?" And then she put her head back down and fell back to sleep. A mighty huntress, she is not.

At least now we know how the mice have been getting in. Last year the electric storage heaters and power sockets in the living room were moved around to make space for our new end room to be built, and it turns out there's now a little hole in the wall right next to the new power socket, which is where the mouse (and, I assume, his earlier brethren, whom we've been catching all year) squiggle in and out. We've blocked the hole as well as we can with a biggish stone, and we're trying to figure out how to block it more permanently. We've also got the (humane) mouse trap sitting just outside the hole, baited with our finest dark chocolate. Needless to say, the mouse has thoroughly ignored it so far, and Maya has thoroughly ignored him.

Grrrrrr.....