I don't like mice. I don't know what purpose they really serve in life, except to be food for snakes which I like even less than mice.

I have mice in my house. Disease carrying little vermin, they scurry around the baseboards. One brazen one runs down the baseboard in the den when I'm watching TV. I named him Spike. I figure he must be a real macho mouse if he'll take risks like that.

And last Monday night, I had a snake in my house. A three-foot rat snake apparently decided to hit the drive-through window under a rocking chair in my dining room on his way to testing my wife's reflexes.

Now, the mice and I have had a limited cease fire since my son became old enough to walk and get into everything below waist level in our house. John managed to get a glue trap stuck to his foot and slapped around the house wearing it like a flip-flop, so the cease fire was declared and traps were set only in places he couldn't reach. Places the mice didn't care about and didn't go to.

Now, back to the snake. He slithered his way across the dining room floor, and my wife spotted him first. She stuttered his existence to me in a stolen-breath whisper, and we took up battle stations, with me circling around to ambush him from the kitchen and my wife keeping an aerial view of the battlefield from the chair in the den, which she had climbed onto about three-ten thousandths of a second after spotting him.

As luck would have it, my 10-year-old daughter was in the shower, blissfully unaware that a battle of epic proportions between good and evil was developing three rooms away. Unaware, that is, until we screamed at her to "Stay in there! There's a SNAKE in the house!"

A sponge mop with no sponge installed was my weapon of choice, which is to say that it's all I had since I decided that shooting a hole in my floor with my 12-gauge, while effective, would involve a lot more cleaning up, and picking him up with my bare hands was about as appealing to me as palpating a cow. A sponge mop can break a snake's back, especially when it's flailed at the back in the same desperate manner that Glenn Close went after Michael Douglas in "Fatal Attraction." With his back broken, I scooped him onto the mop and took him into the carport, where without pomp or ceremony, I dropped a sledgehammer on his head. Dead snake.

I told you all that to tell you this. I bought an electronic mouse trap at Lowes. It's a little electric chair for mice, powered by four AA batteries and a step-up transformer. I turned it on, and there was a whining sound as the transformer juiced up and armed the little steel plates on the floor of the trap.

Spike met his death about two hours after I set the first trap. He was on his nightly journey down the baseboard when the aroma of peanut butter stopped him dead in his tracks. Investigating further, Spike seemed to reason that the smell was coming from the innocuous black box in his path and ventured into the trap. About a half-second later, we heard the zzzzaaaaaapppp, and Spike was no more.

Of course, I was on my feet, pumping my fists and chanting "Yeah!!...Sweet!" over and over again. My daughter, however, was pretty upset about the whole thing, in her 10-year-old innocence not realizing that Spike was a scourge on human existence and having found Spike to be a cute, fuzzy creature that did no wrong.

When I explained Spike's role in life, namely to be food for the snake in the dining room, and that by killing Spike and others like him, she would be far less likely to encounter another snake on his way to the drive-through under the rocking chair, she soon became a field marshal in the War of the Rodents.

The cease fire is lifted, and offensive operations have been rejoined. The score is four electrocuted mice, with one dead by weapons of mass destruction. My wife thought he was sleeping, not poisoned….BWAAHAHAHAH!!!

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