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<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You met Arnold on the \u201cAruba to Santa Marta\u201d post. Arnold is the mouse \u2013 and he\u2019s still here.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Obviously, I knew from the beginning that he couldn\u2019t stay \u2013 a mouse on a boat is a recipe for disaster \u2013 what with their habit of chewing through electric cables and (heaven forbid) inlet hoses. It\u2019s amazing to think that something so small could sink the boat \u2013 but he can \u2013 and unless I can find a way to get rid of him, he may well do just that.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My first thought was that I would get one of those humane mouse traps. I looked them up online: clear plastic, so he won\u2019t feel claustrophobic while waiting for me to release him into the marina rubbish dump.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The dump is not such a good idea, since it is teaming with cats \u2013 but it is better than the skips in town which have been stripped of anything edible by the street people who live around them (sometimes, I believe, <em>in <\/em>them.)<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It didn\u2019t make any difference because the man in the hardware store had never heard of a \u201chumane mouse trap\u201d \u2013 even when Google Translate explained that it was a trap that did not kill the mouse.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What was the point, the man in the hardware store wanted to know, of a mousetrap that does not kill the mouse?<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This gathered quite a crowd around my phone: A mousetrap that did not kill the mouse? Surely the microchips were mistaken…<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It\u2019s just as well that I learned early on to say \u201cI\u2019m English\u201d. It explains a lot over here.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Since I could hardly wait for Amazon to deliver a humane mousetrap to Colombia, in the end, I bought the lethal version. Actually, it\u2019s more of a rat trap \u2013 about twice the size of the ones we have at home and with a spring that really needs both hands. I baited it with a piece of mushroom (Arnold has demonstrated that he\u2019s partial to mushrooms).<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The next morning the mushroom was gone. The trap was still set and there was no sign of Arnold.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So, I looked up advice on YouTube and tried the next night with peanut butter \u2013 peanut butter cannot be removed delicately by tiny hands. It has to be licked off which is more likely to lead to a sticky end.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Arnold licked what he could safely remove and left the rest. It reminded me of leaving mince pies for the reindeer.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So, it was back to the hardware store, this time to buy rat poison. I really didn\u2019t care for this at all \u2013 a quick end is one thing. Condemning Arnold to a lingering death \u2013 and then having him decompose in the farthest recesses of the bilges seemed most distasteful.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But needs must. I topped the peanut butter feast with a dessert of sodium monofluoroacetate, strychnine, zinc phosphide, aluminium phosphide, elemental phosphorus, arsenic, and barium carbonate. It came in the form of a sort of blue cake.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The next morning I got really quite excited on discovering that although, once again, the trap had not been sprung, almost all the peanut butter had gone and – best of all \u2013 the blue cake was missing from the top of little spike which is supposed to set the thing off at the slightest touch.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or not. It turned out that the cake had been removed most carefully – and disposed of at a discrete distance from the feast.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I\u2019m getting fed up with this. Tonight, I shall make a crumble out of the blue cake and mix it with the peanut butter. Surely, even a mouse as cunning as Arnold could not separate the two \u2013 which means he will probably leave the whole serving and help himself to some electric cable with a side order of plumbing.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Meanwhile, any advice would be gratefully received.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You met Arnold on the \u201cAruba to Santa Marta\u201d post. Arnold is the mouse \u2013 and he\u2019s still here. Obviously, I knew from the beginning that he couldn\u2019t stay \u2013 a mouse on a boat is a recipe for disaster \u2013 what with their habit of chewing through electric cables and (heaven forbid) inlet hoses. … <a title=\"Arnold\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/arnold\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Arnold\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3018"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3070,"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3018\/revisions\/3070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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