On my mouse problem & NFL picks

One of my best friends is ready to move out of his parents’ house and it’s all my fault. For the past three years, I’ve taken every opportunity to glamorize living on your own. You can drink as much beer as you want. You can cook whatever you want (or order out, in my case). And most importantly, you can bring a nice girl home without having to warn her that your father sleeps naked on the couch. To borrow a phrase used all too often in sports, moving out has a ton of upside.

Except when you have a mouse.

I can proudly say that I’ve met most of the challenges of living on my own head on. One might even call me a grownup. The bills get paid on time (thank you advertisers). I now understand that layering as opposed to blasting the heat up to 85 degrees is a savvy move. I’ve never turned any of my shirts pink while doing laundry. And I’ve figured out how to go grocery shopping and not just come home with bags of chips and fruit snacks. So the basics are covered.

But when I see a mouse, I become more useless than Snooki at a spelling bee. One night in September, I was watching a Red Sox game when I happened to look over and see one of those furry devils hanging out on my brand new rug. My first thought was to e-mail my landlord and tell him to get his ass over here and take care of the problem, but I decided to handle the situation like a man. So I called my dad. His advice: “Remember, if it comes down to fighting, you’ve got the reach on the little bugger.”

The strangest part of the whole ordeal was that the mouse never moved from my rug in the fifteen minutes it took for me to consider attacking my landlord and to call my father. I realized that this thing was on its last legs. I considered this a victory. It must have been so hungry that it came into my place expecting that the kid living in a basement studio must have left a few crumbs on the floor.

Well guess what, sucker? It just so happens that I had gone out to both lunch and dinner that day and I hadn’t been to Stop & Shop in two weeks. There wasn’t a bite in the house for me to eat, let alone some silly rodent. I considered this a moral victory. My place was so clean that a mouse starved to death on my floor. The Red Sox lost that night, but Dan McGowan won.

I remained on my high horse until about 4:00 A.M. this morning. That’s when I woke up to this awful scratching sound against my wall. A mouse was stuck too one of my glue traps. I had won again. But when I got up to get a broom and sweep away the little bastard, it disappeared. Somehow it managed to get away and now it was on the loose in my apartment. I went back to bed, vowing that I would take care of this when I woke up.

I’ve now woken up and I’m blogging instead of mouse hunting. Here’s why: When I got up, I noticed that another on my glue traps had been turned over while I was sleeping. This thing is antagonizing me now. It’s almost like the mouse is saying, “I know what you did last September.” And now I’m kind of freaked out.

If you never hear from me again, you’ll know why.

I’ll have moved back to my parents’ house and I’ll be too busy doing chores to blog.

Playoff Picks for the weekend
New Orleans 41-27
Indy 24-17
Dallas 30-27
San Diego 17-6