there's a mouse about the house; or, you're a real dude's dude

I woke up in the middle of the night on Wednesday to the squeaking of a terrified mouse that was cornered by Linus "Killer" and Lucy "The Sundance Kid" McFurry-VonMeowerton behind the tv in my room. I really hate that this always seems to happen in the middle of the night, because while I would generally be content to fall asleep and deal with a mouse corpse in the morning, I am afraid that I will in fact wake up to my cats' Thanksgiving feast on my pillow. Several restless hours later I did wake up to clean up the dead mouse in the living room. Fortunately the carnage is limited because once the mouse is dead it no longer holds their interest.

In the morning I mentioned to Frank that the cats had killed a mouse and we talked about it for awhile. Not long after that conversation, Lucy is nosing around in the corner of the living room and sure enough brings a little still alive mouse and drops it at Frank's feet.
Turns out Frank is terrified of mice. And this was a little guy, probably about the same size as the mousie pictured. Frank was crawling up the back of the couch away from this tiny mouserson. I got a dustpan and the little guy just marched up onto it and I set the dustpan on the coffee table.
"Don't leave it there!!" Frank squealed as he went to get the garbage can, into which I dumped the still live mouse. I actually felt really bad about this, but I can't be the one to kill it directly. I learned that what it takes for Frank to actually take out the garbage is a live rodent inside of it. Note to self.
So then today Frank asks me if I have some measuring tape. He explains that he is measuring newspaper. "Oh, are you framing a sports win?" I joked. He looked at me blankly. "Yes. The Giants won the Superbowl" Obviously.
"It's funny," I said, "that I don't really know you very well, but that I guessed that"
"Oh...yeah" Frank said dismissively, "Typical dude stuff."

Yeah, Frank, until you get a baby mouse in front of you, you're a real dude's dude.