Eeeuuuww!

I interrupt my castle travelogue to report that I just discovered a dead mouse in my kitchen. A Dead Mouse.

I was mopping the kitchen floor, and the mop hit the baseboard at the sink and the baseboard fell off. I bent over to pick up the baseboard and put it back and froze as I spotted a mousetrap...with a mouse trapped in it.

It was clearly dead, in fact downright dried up and mummified. Who knows how long it had been there? It had to have been there before we moved in. No doubt the Bad Last Tenants found signs of mice, set up the mousetrap and didn't bother to get rid of it before they left.

I suppose I should be grateful it wasn't alive and wriggling its little life out in the trap, but there I was, bent over and staring at the desiccated thing, feeling the gorge rise up in my throat.

I stood up so that the gorge would not rise any further. After a few deep breaths (luckily I had been mopping so the air was quite fresh-smelling) while deciding how to dispose of the thing, I took a pair of grilling tongs and gingerly picked up the mouse and mousetrap with it and took it out to the garage to the waste bins...only to be confronted with a quandary: in what bin would the recycling-conscious Germans put a dead mouse and mousetrap?

So there I was, dead mouse and mousetrap at the end of the grilling tongs staring at the multiple choice question of recycle bins before me. Obviously the "gelber sack" was out of the question, because though the rule of thumb is that if you can't write on it with a ball point pen and it isn't glass it goes into the gelber sack, the answer is yes and no regarding the mouse and mousetrap. It was a wooden mousetrap, and it was totally possible to write on it with a ball point pen, but of course you can't write on a dead mouse with a ball point pen, and I was not about to separate the two, even though I'm sure Germans would be conscientious enough to do so, in the way one separates the metal lids from glass jars before recycling (the metal lids go in the gelber sack).

The other obvious choices would be either the "hausmull" (general house trash) or "bio waste." I decided on "bio waste" as that sounded hazardous and nasty enough for something like this. So I tossed it in there, and hoped I made the right decision, because there is no way I am going to dig that thing out and put it in another bin. Yuck!