There's a mouse in the house-eeeek!!!

Now I can tough it out through some pretty adverse conditions on a difficult race course, as I displayed last weekend at the RAGE. But put a mouse in my house and I turn into a sniveling coward.

We headed up to Chama yesterday for a few days of "training in altitude" and R&R. Seems one of our doors blew open or something while we were gone. We knew this because the cable guys found it and let us know. So we came armed. Rat poison, traps, poison sticks-you name it..H was the first one in the house. I didn't even want to go in. Well, my brave husband scouted the place first. At first it seemed that we had escaped invasion but then of course, he found traces of basically a mouse party upstairs in our bathroom and bedroom! Great! It was at that point I really wanted to just turn around and go home. H volunteered to do mouse duty while I unpacked the car. Then I found the bird, the dead bird, that was somehow tangled in the television wires behind the TV. Who knows how that happened but again H to the rescue! (I love men). He managed to untangle it after about 10 minutes then I went into cleanup mode. The upstairs I guess was a mess with mouse (or something bigger) droppings, torn up papers-a regular party! I didn't want to see it-it was way too creepy for me, so H cleaned everything out-bless his heart and tried to clean everything with straight Clorox bleach. I pointed out he may burn himself and poison us with this approach so he then diluted it and proceeded to scour the whole upstairs. Of course there was no rodent to be found anywhere-he looked in every nook and cranny. Great-now there is a mouse loose in the house! We set 4 mousetraps in places we thought it might go.

A little history here- In our old house in the foothills of the great southwest about 10 years ago, I woke up and went to the bathroom, only to have a mouse run across my path in the semi-dark. It totally traumatized me. So here we are with another bathroom mouse problem. Why do they like the bathroom so much?? We ended up having quite a mouse problem in that house and had to resort to poison, which I hate-but was the only way to get rid of the critters. Now I just wish they would stay on their side of the wilderness and we will stay on ours thank you very much. I know I am so much bigger than them, they are probably harmless, so my fear is totally irrational!

This AM-one of the traps was sprung with no mouse! I tried to tell H the traps don't work but at least we know now they may have migrated to the storage room downstairs. When I got up to go the BR last night, I just held my breathe until it was all over-no rodent encounter!

Meanwhile, we have a 5 hour bike scheduled for today. It may be slow going up here at 8,000 ft but good hill training and it is really pretty here right now. The snow is all gone, the mud is gone, everything green, high in the 50s. Should be a good training day..

I spoke to Cervelo this week and they are basically replacing my crank because of what they call "ghosting" problem with my chain. Holy cow-the Cervelo service guy at the company was prompt, helpful-very cool. So the service Dept gets two big thumbs up from me. The bike shop I bought the bike from in Florida is getting the new crank out here next week-they are awesome too- so problem should be solved by next week-yea!! In the meantime, I am back on my ole' Ruby Pro (Specialized) road bike, which I raced on all last year. It is as sweet as it's name. We'll see up here in the hills..

Now if we can just get rid of the mice, I will be happy..