House Guest

Well, we have a house guest, again....it's another mouse. Well, it might be a whole family of mice for all I know. James heard some scratching in the wall so we expected to find a furry little creature one day. He was preparing to set some traps with the hopes of catching the little rodent.
On Friday we were in the basement when I told James that we had to vacuum out the furnace/storage room in order to help me get over the paranoia of the spider I saw there last week. (I truly believe the evil little black creature was laughing at me when I saw it. I wanted to get the vacuum cleaner and the spider was sitting there right next to it. Needless to say I didn't end up vacuuming that day; I had to wait until James came home to get it for me.) Anyway, I hadn't been able to go in the room alone since the spider incident (I usually had Jameson accompany me or I would send him in for whatever it was that I needed). James, being the loving husband that he is, willingly helped me clean the storage room.
When we first started James noticed a cookie crumb. No big deal, strange though. Upon further investigation we found another partially eaten cookie and a few chocolate chips. It was at this point that we decided to investigate a bit. I found the source of the cookie crumbs...the bag of fig newtons. There was a neat little hole nibbled into the corner of the bag and about half a dozen fig newtons were missing. Ah ha..... Upon further investigation I noticed a neat little hole nibbled into the corner of a chocolate chip bag. (Not just any chocolate chips by the way, these were PC Decadent Chocolate Chips directly from Canada.) Half of this huge bag (the biggest I could buy) was missing. I figured we had a pudgy chocoholic mouse on our hands. Thankfully it was no where to be seen.
We continued to clean the room when I opened a drawer to get a card. It was then that I discovered something rather interesting...a stash of chocolate chips. Approximately a half a bag of PC Decadent Chocolate Chips worth. I quickly closed the drawer assuming that I would trap Stuart Little if he was still in there. We now had to pull out everything from the room, continue vacuuming and wash any open dishes. We also threw away the cookies, the chocolate chips and the rice cakes. (It got through the first layer of plastic but not the second. I just didn't like the thought of mouse saliva on the bag.) We ended up spending the entire evening cleaning the room. Not my ideal way of spending a Friday night.
I bought some new mouse traps last night and hope that we catch our furry house guest soon; I really don't want to have to go through the ordeal of cleaning that room again. I also don't want to lose my stash of PC Decadent Chocolate Chips.