The Intruders

Last night as I was going down the stairs of my basement, I saw a little mouse on the landing. As soon as I saw the mouse, I screamed and ran upstairs and closed the basement door. The poor little mouse ran down the stairs to the basement. Once upstairs, I started to wonder how I was going to handle this situation. This was the second time in my life that I had encountered a mouse. The first time I was living in an apartment, so I didn’t have to do anything myself in order to get rid of it. But this time, it was my problem.

After I settled down from the shock of seeing a mouse in my house, I decided on a plan of action. I thought tomorrow after work, I’ll go to the hardware store and buy two mousetraps just in case there is more than one mouse living in my basement. Hopefully, someone at the hardware store can show me how to use a mousetrap, since I have never used one. I though I’ll buy some cheese and take it to the hardware store to make sure everything is setup correctly. Last night, as I was laying in bed I wondered about what I would have to do with a dead mouse. How do people dispose of a dead mouse? Would I have to take the dead mouse out of the trap and bury it in the garden, very creepy. Do I simply put the mouse and the mousetrap in the trash? Do I need to tell the guy who picks up the trash that in addition to all the usual garbage there is a decomposing dead mouse in my trash? I have no idea what to do. Maybe I should just google it. One thing is for sure; I’ll have to really clean my basement after all this is over. I saw mouse droppings on the stairs.

There was another intruder in my life over the weekend that caused me quite a bit of stress. Friday night as I was using my computer all of the sudden the screen was filled with a bunch of messages and popups saying that my computer was infected with viruses. I wasn’t able to do anything. The popups kept asking me to buy their antivirus software, which I didn’t. I knew those messages were probably from the virus itself. I already have antivirus software on my laptop. I spent about two hours checking all the security settings on my computer and making sure that I had the latest version of my antivirus software and resurrecting my computer. My computer came back to life, but I could not get rid of the popups that kept appearing every two minutes.

Sunday, I called Jason. He googled the virus and found out how to get rid of it. I read all the instructions for getting rid of the virus, but since it required modifying my computer's registry something that could be risky and I only had done once before, I was hesitant to do it myself. I downloaded a free software that allows remote access to a computer. Once the software was downloaded Jason, who lives in Texas, remotely accessed my computer and for the next hour and a half worked on removing all traces of the virus from my computer. That was the best part of my weekend, having my computer back. Thanks Jason. One intruder gone one left to go.