Uninvited Guests

Providentially, my husband finished a big project yesterday.  I say providentially because last night he came home at 7:30 instead of 11:30.  This meant that he was the one who discovered the four-legged furry vector of various viruses under our portable dishwasher.

Did you hear me shriek?  I'm sorry if it disrupted your evening.  All I can say is I will be grateful to God for a long time to come that Elwood wrapped up his project yesterday, because if I had found that mouse myself on the evening of yet another day of the solo dinner/bedtime gig -- well, I think it might have sent me right over the edge.

Part of me thinks I should be made of sterner stuff.  I should be like a pioneer woman, taking out mice with a cast-iron skillet -- whack! -- in between batches of corn pone.  Although remember that scene in Little Town on the Prairie when the mouse wakes Pa up in the night, nibbling away at his hair?  It's a good thing Ma didn't rely on the cast-iron skillet extermination method, or we would have had Epidural Hematoma on the Prairie and Trepanation by the Shores of Silver Lake. 

(We interrupt this post to tell you that there are some powerfully odd people in this world.  I was googling to see if there were two n's or three in trepanation and discovered that there is a movement touting trepanation as a route to higher consciousness.  "It's safer than LSD!" one says.  Personally, I would not expect DIY cranial surgery and higher consciousness to go hand in hand, but I suppose one never knows.)

But back to the subject at hand, which is these creatures who have no higher consciousness but do possess an unerring instinct for pricey comestibles.  The last time we had mice they spurned the one-pound bag of bleached white flour but had a party in my bulk-purchased organic grains.  I tried hiding my bulk foods in the oven at night while we were working on mouse eradication.  Did you know mice can get into your oven easily?  My efforts at starving them out resulted only in mouse droppings all over the oven floor.  Nothing says home like the smell of roasting rodent excreta.

Last time we tried to trap them before we called in the big guns.  This time, remembering the quivering live mice in glue traps and the stiffened-in-their-death-throes mice in spring traps, I wanted to go right to the pros.  So I pulled out the phone book.  (Let your fingers do the whacking, so to speak.)  I called our downstairs neighbor, and sure enough she spotted a mouse yesterday.  I called our old landlord and got the name of the exterminator he used.  I called our new landlord and explained. 

He doesn't want to call an exterminator.  He wants me to poison them myself.

I have a two-year-old, though, who hasn't quite learned that pretty blue things on the floor are not for eating, and the warnings on the bait-tray packages alarm me.  I am going to look today for tamper-proof containers and single-dose bait cookies, but I am doing it grumpily.  I want them dead.

Part of me also wonders if "I want them dead" is inconsistent with the "we are gentle with living things" line that I am forever spouting to my children.  Should I say, "We are gentle with living things although we have no qualms about inducing fatal hemorrhages in disease-carrying vermin that invade our pantry"?  What would St. Francis do?  Did he have feeding stations in his refectory?  (Do mendicant friars even have refectories?) (I've seen the humane traps.  They give me the heebie-jeebies.  Not very Franciscan of me, I suppose.)

I am going now to put my bulk-purchased nuts in the freezer (they can't get into the freezer, can they?) and my big bags of oats and rice in a plastic tub with a tight-fitting lid.  I will leave you with the Gladly family's version of Hop on Pop:

MOUSE HOUSE mouse in house MOM CALM mom was not calm SHRIEK! EEK! mom did freak OUT! OUT! mom did shout FIE! DIE! mom did cry BAIT! GREAT! and now we wait

Comments

[Summer]

We get mice in the house every year at about this time, too. Vince recently spotted on on the stairs, and he was manly enough to catch it in an empty cardboard box. He didn't tell me what he did with it afterwards....

I already knew about mice getting into the oven. Did you know they can get in the dishwasher, too? At least they can get into my crappy dishwasher. A few years ago, I opened the dishwasher right after it ran a cycle and I was greeted with the sight of a stiff mouse tail jutting out of an impossibly tiny opening on the inside of the door. We had to take apart the dishwasher door to get the dead mouse out. Oh, it was a horror. That might have been the moment that I started desperately wanting to get rid of that old dishwasher. Yuk. There's also nothing like running the dishwasher at night, then opening it the next morning and finding mouse turds on your supposedly-clean dishes.

I feel you. KILL THEM. If they want to live, they can just go back outside. It's their choice.

[mama owl, queen of parentheses]

I almost developed a fondness for the house mouse we (my mother and I) had over the summer of 1994, even though I spent the first day or so after spotting it hiding in my bedroom. We just spent so long sharing quarters and I started to realize it was not out to get me, although it may have unintentionally harbored disease or something. One time the mouse and I both sort of stayed frozen in the kitchen, apparently too afraid of each other to move. I was wielding a broom, but was still afraid. I did feel kind of bad for it when I learned that the poison it eventually succumbed to (with some help from my mother and probably that same broom as it tried to make it across the living room in its death throes) didn't just knock it out and let it die in its sleep.

[Tiffany]

Time to GET A CAT! We had an infestation of mice in our kitchen and pantry last winter. It was disgusting. I found one dead under a pile of unfolded clothes once. (He saw the neverending laundry stack and decided life was no longer worth living, I guess. Some days I don't blame him).

The last straw was when my dh cleaned out the pantry. He had already killed over 20 mice by then. (Our landlady was having the building appraised, so we figured we had better) He said it was the grossest thing he had ever done, and promptly proclaimed we were getting a cat on his next day off. So, my cousin called and told us of a wonderful cat that needed a home. We got him just when my husband had said. (Providential, no?) and have had no mouse problems ever since.

Oh, and we had to talk our landlady into it, but she is fine now. (saves her getting an exterminator)

Good luck!

[Jamie]

Y'all are giving me the shudders and making me laugh at the same time. In the dishwasher?? More than 20?? La la la I'm just going to assume that we have pathetic feeble mice, collectively running for the woods right now, quaking at the thought of me and my cast iron skillet (and my bait cookies). Mama Owl, I admire your sympathy for one of God's creatures but I cannot emulate it.

Tiffany, today was laundry catch-up day and I laughed to myself about your mouse who lost the will to live. I cannot get a cat because my husband and my oldest son are allergic to them, but if the mice took note of the laundry piles around here before this evening, they are in the Slough of Despond right now. Here's hoping the Slough of Despond is like a less messy glue trap from which they will never emerge.

[alicia the midwife]

All that a cat does is limit where the mice hang out. We have 4 cats, one of whom is indeed a mighty hunter. I've never seen a live mouse in the house, but I see the mouse trail in an up cupboard (the one where we keep the plastic bags of catnip and cat treats - where they can't get to them!). In my house in California, I once opened the drawer where I kept my kitchen linens, and found a mama mouse with a full nest of babies. I admit that I shreiked and carried the drawer outside, dumping the contents (towels, washcloths and all) on the dirt in front of the dog. That was when I decided that the long overdue kitchen renovation was being pushed to the top of the list. I tore out all the base cabinets and found the mouse's entry hole behind the sink cabinet. I found that all the insulation in the stove had been chewed and shredded, and so we ended up replacing that stove. Once we had done all the kitchen repairs and replacements, we had no more trouble with mice.
BTW - I have found that the only re-eusable food containers that mice are stopped by are glass jars with tightly sealing lids, and Tupperware brand storage containers. Food is also safe from mice in the fridge/freezer and in the microwave. I have had them chew through the cheap plastic containers, and definitely through plastic bags.
MY husband is also constantly battling mice at the transmission sites for the radio station. It is warm in those buildings, and mice love to shred and use the fiberglass insulation.

[Julian O'Dea]

Rats are more revolting. Mice I can handle and bang on the head but rat killing a male job and what husbands are for. We had a rat family up in our roof and as husband is the male killing them and getting rid of their horrible bodies is his job. Thank god for ratsack.
We now have 3 cats and our old greay puss is the one to kill the rats. Cats are worth their weight in gold where vermin are concerned.