Mousetrap: a mystery blog entry in one act

Today I spent a large portion of my day chasing down a mouse, only this wasn't one of those pesky rodents that the cat drags in and drops at your feet. I was looking for the mouse to the computer. We have a wireless optical mouse for the desktop and the table it sits on is just the right height for my daughter to reach up and grab things off of. I know this sounds cute, and I guess it is if you're not the owner of the mouse, but crawling around the house on your hands and knees looking for a pointing device is no way to spend an afternoon.

After rescuing a feisty non-napping Meryl from her crib I went to go check my email. Alas, the mouse was nowhere in sight. I looked under the desk, around it, in the closet next to it and still no mouse. Meryl, who was watching me he whole time, finally said one of the new words in her growing vocabulary.

Mouse.

OK, so she knew what I was looking for, which I assumed to mean she also knew where I could find it. So I asked her, "Meryl, where's the mouse?"

Mouse.

"Yes, Sweetie, the mouse. For Dad's computer? Where is it?"

Mouse? This time she says it with an upward inflection as though she's asking me where it is.

I then proceded to wander throughout the house trying to put myself in the mind of a toddler so as to figure out where she might have deposited it. Because I, myself, am absent minded I soon start to wonder if in fact it was I who removed it from its regular spot. Would I have accidentally picked it up when I was looking for something else maybe? I quickly decided that even as scatter brained as I sometimes am, I'm not the type to have just carried a computer mouse around while doing my household bidness. A real mouse maybe but not a computer mouse.

I resorted to crawling around the floors of various rooms looking under beds and behind couches. All this time Meryl followed close behind taunting me by just saying over and over mouse mouse mouse mouse. I couldn't tell if she was implying that she too was looking for the mouse or if she remembered having the mouse or was she thinking of Goodnight Moon's young mouse in the little toyhouse [sic]? Then another time she quit saying mouse and instead said Chris, apparently claiming the mouse was taken by our termite guy whose name she learned earlier that day when she supervised him as he crawled behind our couch looking for bugs.

Cute as she was, she wasn't being much help. And to top things off this was moments before my wife was due to come home. This time is usually set aside for madly running around the house cleaning slash straightening slash kicking things under the beds and sweeping things under the rugs.

Then I had this fleeting sense of dread. You know that scene in Poltergeist where the parents are looking for little Carol Anne after her disappearance and the mom gets this contorted look on her face just before saying in this eerily quiet panick-stricken voice the swimming pool . . . oh my God . . . she's in the swimming pool ? Then Craig T. Nelson has to dive into that preconstruction mud pit that was to eventually become their pool in order to find his kid. While I wasn't concerned Meryl had fallen into a swimming pool or worse yet that I was going to have to swim around in mud with the skeletal remains of bewildered souls because someone only moved the headstones, I probably did have that same contorted look on my face.

THE POTTY!!! OH MY GOD, SHE THREW IT IN THE POTTY!!!

I dashed to the master bathroom where Meryl generally sits on the potty and I lifted the lid. Nothing but water and a bowl that I probably was supposed to have scrubbed clean before Elaine got home. I looked around the toilet thinking maybe Meryl just dunked the mouse in the potty a few times before throwing it down on the floor the way she likes to do with her rubber ducky, her socks or my toothbrush. Still no mouse.

I checked the other two bathrooms in the house. More toilets to clean but still no mouse. I looked in the shower and the bathtub. I opened bathroom cabinets, pulled open drawers, looked under folded washcloths. Nothing. Finally I gave up because time was running short and there was a bed to be made, dinner to plan for and stuff to sweep under the rug.

Once I checked the cursory house straightening off my list I went back into the room with the computer to check yet again to see if I could find the mouse. Apparently as I was tidying Meryl had taken it upon herself to bang on the keyboard just enough to bring up several blank search windows. Just seeing them made me all the more frustrated. I had no mouse to close them out. A motionless cursor poised in the upper right corner of the screen just sat their adding insult to injury. The screensaver came on but I still knew those unwanted windows were lurking behind it. I briefly tried remembering the ALT-key combinations that would work the various menus on the screen before giving up and just turning the damn thing off.

Elaine arrived home happy to see a smiling baby and the beginnings of Shrimp Scampi laid out on the kitchen counter. I explained to her that Meryl had run off with the mouse and I had looked everywhere for it to no avail. "It'll turn up," she said.

It did.

Elaine found it in Meryl's toy basket that we keep in the living room. I guess I should be happy she's the kind of kid who puts things up when she's through playing with them. She gets that from her mom. As much time as I spend playing on the computer it would make sense that my daughter saw it fit to put the mouse in the toybox. After all, that basket serves as one of my old standbys for an easy place to quickly get rid of something. Oh well.

Shrimp scampi was good. Meryl spent the evening playing and laughing in spite of not having napped. My wife and I enjoyed a good bottle of Australian Outback backseat wine and I can point and click again.

This house. Is clean.