mice & a recipe (no, not together).

DISCLAIMER: if the words "mouse" or "mice" are incredibly disturbing to you, you may not want to read further.  Or, you could just skip to the end where the delicious recipe is!

UGH.  I have been feeling quite overwhelmed and frustrated with this "little" situation we've been having since the end of February.  It's called....MICE in our apartment!  Ew!!  To this date we can count having seen 3 alive 3 dead (in a trap).  1 of those living ones was...caught alive. By: ME.  Yesterday!  ACK!  The exterminator came a week ago as of yesterday (why, you may ask, did the exterminator come just yesterday when you've had an issue since Feb?! Well, I suppose our management company didn't take me seriously enough.  They just gave us commercial traps that weren't supposed to be in an apartment unit.  Fun, right?!).  Also, I just want to say for the record that I feel like we are VERY clean!!  I clean the same day every week!  So I don't feel like it makes a ton of sense for them to be here.  I suppose we didn't have our food stored very well though.  That's taken care of now!!

Well here's yesterday's story:
Job started freaking out near my work closet (which contains my sewing machine, my stock of paper supplies, our hanging shirts and sweaters (since we don't have a closet in our bedroom), TONS of leftover fabric from school, and more!) and I was pretty sure he had seen something....I was hoping he was wrong.  He wasn't.  I had kept returning to the closet to see if maybe I could find the culprit.  One time, I did.  Job was on it!  He was sort of swatting and attempting to eat (or maybe just play with?) when I remembered that this mouse could have eaten rodenticide.  So I got nervous and yelled at Job.  Either way the mouse didn't look so hot.  No blood or anything, but he just looked...slow, and mice aren't slow!  Well, in Job's hesitation from my yelling the little mouse got away.  I figured he poked into a crevice (our molding doesn't touch the wood floor in our pantry or said closet.  This is a problem.  Our wonderful maintenance man will be taking care of that soon!) so I walked away and proceeded to text Dan and some friends in my anxious state (oh, and call the management company).  Well, a little while later I had somehow mustered up the courage to move the some things that were on the floor around to just see if he had actually stayed in the closet and not creeped into a crevice.  A squeal and big breath later...I realized he had stayed.  I called Dan.  Help!  I really didn't want to have to take care of the issue, but...so no way around it.  HOW was I going to get any work done if I didn't take care of it?!  Who else could take care of it for me?!  (No one is the answer to that).  So after talking with Dan I grabbed some plastic tupperware and stuck it at the exit.  He was trapped in the direction he was facing.  I used some foam core that was in the closet and scooted him into the tupperware. I put the lid on it.  I felt like a BIG, HUGE, AWFUL criminal.  I still sort of do...but, even though a part of me thought this little guy was cute I did NOT want him in my apartment. Oh it was a really terrible feeling taking him to the trash and seeing him sniffing around in the tupperware.  I thought through the fact that he probably has ingested poison, which could hurt other outdoor creatures.  And...if he had ingested poison, he would have just died elsewhere and become someone else's issue!!!  Oh how I tried to think through things. Ultimately though, he needed to leave our apartment.  This was all followed by a very thorough lysol cleaning.

Eh...I hope this problem stops soon.  They have been getting into our food and pooping in our pantry and closet for WAY too long.

On a good note, during this fiasco, I was making this:

roasted fall veggie & ricotta pizza (RECIPE HERE) from martha!

Thankfully, the mouse incident didn't upset my stomach.  At least not a couple of hours later.  Found out Whole Foods sells 22 oz. of freshly made pizza dough for $2.50!!  GENIUS!  I think we'll be having pizza weekly from now on.

Happy Friday!!  The weather is FINALLY nice here :)