Wild Kingdom

It's been the normal type of fall here, when the mice move in and start making a mess. I purposely dried alot of mint this summer and have been laying sprigs of it all over in hopes of keeping the mice away. It does seem to help. Delilah the Cat has been sitting guard in front of the dishwasher and so far I haven't had any mice run over my toes while cooking. But last week, we heard a weird sqweak and low and behold she had caught a mouse. One of those little black ones that are so slow moving that I can usually catch them with a plastic bowl. Since it was her first mouse ever, we let her play with it awhile. When I thought she'd had enough, I tried to grab it with a bowl and "GRRRRRRR!!!" I never heard a cat growl before, but Delilah did. So, being the scardey cat I was, I just let her keep it. Before long, she had caught another, and then I confiscated the first one. She ended up getting three that night and we were really proud of our indoor cat.
But....
The mice decided to fight back.
I thought with all the work Delilah was doing catching mice, she must have gone on an eating spree. She went thru a pound box of food in 2 1/2 days! I got up one morning to her be-mewing the fact she was hungry again and while I stood there without my glasses on, I realized that she was eyeing beyond her food dish and then a mouse ran across my toes. The mice had moved from the kitchen to the laundry room and were eating the cat food!
But....
The cat decided to fight back.
Yesterday, Delilah was once again eyeing under the dishwasher. She then moved to the stove, and I thought, oh what the hay, I'll take out the stove drawer and let her under there.Within 30 seconds she caught a mouse. And right this moment she has caught another. So Cat 5, mice . . . uhm, I don't know. How many mice can there be?
Jake the Dog didn't want to be left out of this, so he has been busy barking at anything and everything that moves in the yard. And then when he comes inside, he still barks at the neighbor when he is coming home from work. That means barking at three in the morning. And waking all of us up. Jake the Dog also tried to help keep the mice away by cleaning off the counter for me. By cleaning I mean he ate my soup. Only the best soup I had EVER made. I told him in my best Soup Nazi voice "No Soup for You!" and threw him outside for 2 days. It was kind of funny to hear the kids telling him "No Soup for You!" for days on end.

Spooky ~not!

Ok, so I'm upstairs and I hear a really loud man's voice coming from my living room downstairs. No one else is home. I grab my kid's baseball bat and his wooden civil war rifle that looks real except it has an orange tip on the end. I start to head down stairs when I realize the dog has jumped into the chair and sat on the tv remote's volume button.