Is it wrong . . .

. . . to get excited about a mousetrap?

At our house, NO!

Thanks to the fact we live in an old house in the middle of a cornfield, mice are a seasonal nuisance. I run a trap line in the basement through the fall and early winter and average a couple of catches a week until A) I catch all the stupid ones and/or B) the rest of them find a place to spend the winter that is not inside our house where they would be tempted by the Peanut Butter Lure of Death.

Apparently I had worn out our previous traps by too many successful trapping seasons. (That is very, very wrong on so many levels.) The mice were eating the peanut butter right off them without springing them. Great. The only way they were going to set off the old traps was if they ate so much peanut butter they got fat enough to spring the lever when they sat on it.

So today on the way home from the Muscatine agility trial (which has so far brought varying degrees of brilliance and train wreck-age), I stopped at the new Thiesen's in Coralville.

It was a religious experience.

If you don't have a Thiesen's where you live, it's a farm store. But it's more. It's the ultimate farm store. They have everything. This new store is huge. It has more of everything.

Seriously, that's the store motto: We have more of everything.

You'd better believe it, too. (But sorry, Rilda, they didn't have 2" orange vetwrap. So I guess they lied.)

They have mousetraps.

They have BETTER mousetraps as evidenced here.

This was too cool. I am all about mousetraps that are easy to set. And these said so right on the package. So of course it had to be true.

I had to try them out.

Right there in the store.

The manufacturer had cleverly packaged the traps so you could do this.

I did. WOW! That was super easy. I got so excited I must have shaken the cardboard they were attached to.

SNAP! SNAP!

Holy crap! Glad my fingers weren't in there! 

I looked around to see if anyone was watching.

Nobody was.

So I did it again.

COOL!

I was fascinated.

I bought them and brought them home. (I also bought cat food. Is that an oxymoron, to buy mousetraps AND cat food? If the cats were doing their job, I wouldn't need the mousetraps. But that would mean the cats would have to be in the house. And the only one happy about THAT would be Phoenix.)

Here is one of the new traps, all set up with the tasty Peanut Butter Lure of Death. I'll let you know how it works. (No pics, I promise.)

Seriously, only people who have had to trap mice will fully appreciate this. If you live in a mouse-free zone, count your blessings. Start now.