Last night, I was on my couch in my room, resting my tired calves from the intense badminton game earlier that evening while I watched Oprah. As they talked about the alarmingly incresing number of suburban teenage girls entering prostitution, I heard a faint scratching sound from the corner of my room. I peered over my dresser which partially blocked my view. Suddenly, Alfred appeared from behind my pretty green storage box and scurried out of my room, passing through the small space between my door and the floor. The sight was enough to send chills down my spine. I am very territorial about my room, and the idea of sharing it with a rodent is utterly horrifying. I placed a sheet of flypaper by the door and dropped a small cookie chunk in on it. After a few minutes, Alfred was walking over the flypaper trying to grab the cookie. I couldn't believe my eyes, it knew how to avoid the sticky surface! As soon as it got hold of his prize, though, he started to flee, but it's tail got stuck. I guess it realized that it wasn't a good thing, because it dropped the cookie and started making sqeaky noises. Yesss! I finally caught the damn thing. But my celebration was very short-lived. Yes, I trapped the sucker, but I had no idea how to throw it out. Ew. Just the though made me shiver again. I paniced when I saw it trying to wriggle its tail free. My sister heard me scream, so she peered from inside her room. When she saw my predicament, she suggested that I trap it with an upside-down bucket, so I did. Good idea. At this point, the mouse was able to Wriggle free from the fly paper, but it was still trapped inside the bucket. Great. Now I really didn't know what to do. I put on some decent clothes and went downstairs. I called the building maintenence boy and asked him to do something about it. To my horror, brought a kind of cement tool with which to kill it. The picture of rodent blood on our floor made me suddenly queasy. Luckily, he resorted to transferring it to a garbage bag and brought it downstairs. Whether or not Alfred still lives at this moment, I do not care to find out.

As I disinfected the spot where the bucket served as Alfred's prison with Lysol, I looked back at my Jessica Simpson moment and vowed to

1) always make sure there is fly paper lying around the condo,
2) treat the maintenance people well all the time, lest another incident like this happens, and
3) disinfect, disinfect, and disinfect.


*Note: "Alfred" was a term coined in college, when we had a rodent problem in our dorm. They say that mice know when they are being talked about, hence the baptism.