Worthless.

Guinness has spent almost every minute of freedom today sitting in the corner of my room facing the wall. I say almost every minutes, because he did devote a few moments to knocking over my Diet Dr. Pepper and gnawing on my sandwich while I went to the kitchen to get a towel to clean up the spilled Diet Dr. Pepper, but that is pretty much par for the course. Anyway, the point is, he has finally dedicated himself to a normal cat activity. He is guarding my apartment from mice. Unfortunately for him, the mouse he is currently hunting is stuck in the wall. It has been there since at least 4 a.m. this morning when I unhappily awoke to the all-too-familiar desperate scratching sound coming from the corner of my bedroom closest too my face when I sleep. This is the second time this happy event has occurred in the last month.

Here are two things I have learned from the first Mouse-in-the-Wall experience. First, the mouse will never escape. No matter how much the little guy squirms, gnaws, and scratches at the insides of the exterior wall, it will not materialize in my room. Guinness is wasting his time. Not that he has ever partaken in an activity that I wouldn't characterize as a waste-of-time, but I am really concerned about his sanity here. Second, the mouse will die in two or three days. Usually i would be sad for the little whippersnapper, but it is SO ANNOYING. I can no longer sleep in my bedroom and have to spend all my time on the futon in the living room until the sucker dies.

Anyway, personal complaints aside, I must explain why this post is entitled "Worthless". This is the third mouse visit to my apartment. Even Mouse-in-the-Wall, Part I wasn't the first appearance. About five months ago, I returned from my internship in Charlotte to a small household of three mice living under my stove. Because I didn't have much food in the house immediately upon my return, I didn't even notice their presence until a few days into my stay at my apartment. The more disturbing part is that Guinness didn't notice either. His nose is six inches above the level of their happy little home and he didn't notice a thing. He spends at least an hour laying in the kitchen every day and STILL nothing. So of course, when I did realize that bread didn't eat itself I took care of the problem myself.

A few days after identifying the problem, exterminators arrived and placed trays of sticky material under the stove to catch any mouse stragglers, and pushed said trays all the way back towards the kitchen wall in the least accessible areas. And THIS is when my useless ball of black puff decided to involve himself. I entered my kitchen one afternoon after hearing a weird clunking noise to find Guinn hobbling around the stove area stuck to the sticky mouse-trapping device, apparently pleased with his capture...of himself.

What a waste of cat life! He doesn't do a thing when actual mice are loose in my kitchen but he traps himself by aggressively hunting plastic trays. Now, he has devoted his entire day to taking Mouse-in-the-Wall, Part II into his own hands. Worthless.