To begin with: :smack:
I got home to my apartment today and disaster ensued. I went upstiars to find something to eat but my eye was caught by something on my condiment/dry goods shelf. After sorting through shortly my brain had to mentally calculate what I was seeing: “Oh my god, there are two mice struggling to stay afloat inside a bottle of vegetable oil.” (btw, I have never even seen an ant in my place, nevertheless rodents). Instantly I had a million questions in my head. Why do I have mice in this bottle? Why was there no cap on this bottle? How the hell did they even fit through the narrow top? Why was there TWO?
Possible scenario:
Mouse #1: Help help! I’m struggling to stay alive in this bottle of oil!
Mouse #2: I’ll be right in!
Now I know what most of you are thinking, a good solution to this is to just throw away the bottle of veggie oil. No one needs mouse flavoring in there stir fry. Nevermind the mouse shit also floating in there (they must have been in there for more time than I’m comfortable thinking about.) I’m sure some are even thinking that I’ve discovered a little known new form of a mouse trap. But I have a soft part in my heart for all small creatures, whether they be household pests or not.
So my mind instantly goes into rescue mode! But how? Obviously in the most absurd way possible.
After taking 2 pictures of this with my camera phone I race downstairs to look for some type of receptacle, I empty out a small plastic trash bin. I take this downstairs and begin to fill it with water in my shower. My thinking was to let them crawl out of the bottle and plop them into a shallow bin of water to try and rinse them off. They’ve already been swimming for more than a day, whats a couple more minutes? After it fills to about half a foot I go upstiars to retreive the little survivors. I try and tip the bottle of oil so that the mice can crawl out the top without getting a lot of oil to fall into the bucket of water. this didn’t work, because the bigger of the two just pushed the other one out of the way and crawled halfway out the top to rest on the lid, while the other was left to continue fighting for a breath in the oil.
Now of course I couldn’t actually TOUCH the mice! That would be “ew”.
Now now I’ve abandoned hope of getting as little oil as possible in the bucket, and I start shaking the bottle upside down to try and unhinge this larger mouse stuck in the top.
Plop…
…
…
Plop!
I try tipping the bucket to drain it into my shower drain, and luckily the mice fight the currrent and try to scamper to the bottom when I tip it. I now have a bucket slicked with oil and two mice still covered like a sea lion in an oil spill. I could try to rinse them, but I know water alone wouldn’t get all this oil off.
Think… what gets rid of oil? An emulsifying agents! Whats an emulsifying agent? Soap!
So now I begin filling the bucket again with these two poor and completely exhausted mice. I didn’t want to use anything harsh, because I remeber how much it sucked to get shampoo in my eyes as a child. I have a female roomate who uses Dove brand soap. So my super intelligent self thinks, “Well, Dove is so gentle on my skin, it must be okay to use in a mouse bath!”
So I am massaging a bar of soap in the shower stream as its filling the bucket of mice again. After I get about 2 inches of soapy water I try to think how I can wash this oil off them. Just to recap, I can’t actually touch the mice, because that is “ew”. So I figure what I can do is mix them all together! I begin swirling the bucket of sopay water with the mice in it, rather vigoursly too because I am trying to clean them off as best I can.
In other words I have resuced them from an oil drowning death and thrown them into a TYPHOON of soapy water!
After several other rinses I take the bucket outside and dump the mice onto my lawn. Now the bigger one is just sprawled out completely wasted of any enrgy on the grass and the smaller one is breathing very shallowly. I realize that in my efforts to try and help this mouse I have in fact just drowned it. So infront of all the walking commuters on their way to the train stop I live next to I give up on my “ew” rule and begin attempting mini-cpr on the smaller mouse. Basically that means I I am just slightly rubbing its abdomen trying to induce life.
That doesn’t work so I run upstairs again to try and get a piece of bread to maybe try to get them to eat something. When I get back the smaller mouse is dead. Dead dead. No bread crumbs or faux-cpr is bringing this unfortunate creature of God back. I place the bread next to the larger mouse and it just seems too exhausted to eat. Now there is a cat that lives next door, and frequently prowls the area. I think that if I leave this mouse out here it won’t spontaneously recover and live a fruitful life, it is dead meat for that cat. So the only thing I can do is put this mouse back in the bucket and nurse it back to life.
So right now, as I work there is a mouse in a bucket in my room. There is a dish of water, a piece of bread, and a sock in there too because for some reason my demented head thinks the mouse would like a sock.
Somehow I began the day with only a fish, but now I am a pet owner to a fish and a mouse I “rescued”. Rescued is in paranthesis because I think it would have all been better if I just poured the bottle out outside. But I like the idea of having a pet I rescued.
When my aunt comes over with her dog Sparky and tells me house it’s a Katrina dog she rescued from New Orleans I can gleam and point to “my mouse that I rescued from a bottle of vegetable oil.” It’s almost the same thing.
