Nezumi-ga Iru

Place has mice. Either that or the next-door neighbors are trying to tunnel through with a blunt spork, one scrape at a time, in the middle of the night, and the upstairs neighbors have remarkably short legs and spend nights running footraces up and down the living room. In short, mice. Also, the laundry room shows spoor of mice.

I have read that aside from renting a cat, which the complex forbids in the strongest terms, a green-flavored, all-organic means of getting rid of mice is rats. To get rid of the rats, the Granola People recommend terriers, which are in turn trumped by wild asses. Wild asses can be evicted by orangoutangs, orangoutangs by mud-puppies, mud-puppies by ibexes---which will pretty much make their home where they please unless they espy caimans. Caimans will only respond to the strongest of remedies: Mme. Speaker Nancy Pelosi herself. Since I do not want to start a sequence of events that can only end with SanFran NaN roaming my apartment, turning off my appliances, raising my taxes and injecting herself with Botox, I guess I'll buy a mousetrap. (One of these days all those face-lifts will fail, suddenly, and Mme. Sprecher NaN will be left looking like a pug dog. I hope it happens in the Congressional chambers. That much stored energy, all going at once, is going to make a bang so loud it will wake up the Congresscritters sitting in the back rows!)