The Mercedes and The Mice

I put up a post at The City Farmgirl Blog and promised to tell a story. Here it is.
 
My husband used to have the prettiest white 450 SL Mercedes convertible. It was his "single days" car. After we got married, he kept it. We used to tool through the city or out on country roads on Sunday afternoons. One spring day we were riding out in the country, the rag top down, the sweet smelling breeze blowing through our hair.

Life was good. Not a care in the world.

"What was that?!" he asked as he swatted at and then quickly looked down at his right ankle.
"What do you mean?! What was it?!" I asked.
"Get out of the car," he said firmly as he started slowing down.
I did indeed!

I unstrapped my seat belt and JUMPED up and over the car door (not opening it), falling to the side of the country dirt road.

He pulled over and stopped the car, and ran back to where I had landed on the ground. I was sitting up and fine, but dazed.
"I can't believe you just jumped out of a moving car," he said. "Are you okay?"
"I'm better than I was in that car with a snake!" I screamed, totally freaked out.
He helped me up and I brushed myself off.
"It wasn't a snake," he said, "It was baby mice. They fell on my leg!"

"Well, dammit," I said.
I'm not afraid of mice in the least. I would never have jumped out of a moving car like that for a mouse!
"I thought there was a snake slittering up your leg!"
"No, it was mice. On my leg!"

I wasn't fazed. I had a hamster growing up that I loved, Sweet Harriette. She lived in my room for 4 or 5 years, a record maybe for hamster longevity. She is buried in my parent's backyard. (My Dad told me not long ago that he had accidentally dug up Sweet Hariette's coffin when he was planting a shrub.) So, mice do not bother me at all. In act, I think they are adorable. Not my husband.

We didn't hear a peep from those mice again on the trip home. Once we got there, my husband closed the roof of the car. "I'll take care of them tomorrow," he said. I went to take a hot bath to cleanse my scrapes from the car jump.

We both went to work early the next morning.
On my way home I stopped by the store and bought hamster food for the mice living in his Mercedes.
On the way home he bought a trap for those same mice.

I got home first. I took the lid from a jar and filled it with hamster food. I went out and put it in the floor board of the car. "Come here, little mices, din-din..."

When he got home later, he went to the car to set up the trap. He found the hamster food in the jar lid.

He's still laughing about it today, 20 years later.

Once he realized how I was with those mice (and am with living creatures--especially those with fur),  he purchased a live trap for the mice. Over the next few weeks he caught almost 20 baby mice in his car. We finally figured out that he was catching the same mice over and over and over again!

And that's the end of The Mercedes and the Mice story.
See? Totally off topic!