Warning: I always win in a Mexican Standoff.

In the ten or so years of living in the middle of the woods, we've only one invasion of a field mouse. That is until a week ago. Minding my own business and insulting the local weather person for a bad forecast, I spied a little rodent scurrying from my kitchen to our TV cabinet. At first I was angry--how dare that mouse watch our cable television without paying his fair share. Then I realized I was transferring my anger at Wesley recording his Transformers cartoon over my Supernatural episode to the poor mouse.

Nonetheless, it had to go. I stocked up on humane mouse traps from the "maze trap" to the sticky Mouse Hotel. I place them in various mouse hot spots.

Three days go by and no Mickey. We come home from school and lo and behold, Wesley sees the mouse in the middle of our hall. We all freeze including the dog. I whisper to Wesley to get the cat.

Tangent here: Yes we have a cat but she is an outdoor cat who catches various animals from time to time including moles, chipmunks and three snakes (a dead snake made onto the top of my car but that's another story). Phat Phrancis does not do well indoors--she teases Zack and quite frankly, is more of a pest than any rodent. Maybe Phat Phrancis only does reptile extermination in the house. I don't know but she is totally useless in this situation.

Phrancis prances down the hallway and comes within a foot of the mouse. She twitches her tail and leaves (the cat twitches, not the mouse). Apparently the mouse is either a)inbred and does not know that a cat is a mouse's enemy or b)is completely blind and has no sense of smell or c)got into the wine cabinet and is so intoxicated it blew the Mouse Breathalizer.

I smudge a bit of peanut butter inside an old coffee can and ask Wesley to bring my trowel so I can shove the mouse inside completely once it goes in.

Tangent #2: If that mouse escaped and made it into Regan's room, Regan would never sleep in there again. If it made it into Wesley's room, the mouse would sue us for unsanitary conditions. If got to our bedroom, I'd stay awake all night fuming about the mouse's cable theft.

It goes into the can and here comes Wesley with a six foot post hole digger. The mouse was released into the woods and warned never to come back or else be billed for cable.