Minty fresh mouse traps

After the oil change folks cleaned out my car’s air filter, where apparently the country mice were partying heartily, I drenched it in peppermint oil to drive them off—who knew those hitchhiker mice don’t like mint?  So instead of vacating the premises, they merely moved abodes. I had a sleekit timorous mousy living in my emergency brake sheath. I dumped peppermint oil down the shaft too and my car smelled like a strong breath mint with vague undertones of mice urine. My car reeked with the toxic odor of mint oil, so strong that it made my eyes water, and I couldn’t use the air conditioner or the heater, let alone, drive the car without leaving all the windows open. God knows what it was doing to my lungs. The mouse ate through my food stashes, chewing through Ziploc baggies and canisters, and then it moved onto my art supplies which made for colorful poop scattered at both ends of my car. Then it began to shred the car insulation and paper to make a nest. I removed several nests, but she was persistent. The last thing I needed was a mouse raising her family in my emergency brake sheath. It came down to this, it was either the mouse, or me. I was tired of being a mouse chauffeur, not to mention, unpaid landlord. Besides, I could not tolerate the grassy odor of a pissy rodent living in the close confines of my car. Especially during the heat wave. I feared that the wiring would be next. I tried all manner of snap-traps and glue traps. She didn’t like peanut butter, and deftly removed the nuts and grains that I left as bait. Nothing worked until the exterminator gave me huge extra-strength glue traps meant for rats. It was a case of location location location. I tried several spots in the car, nothing worked. Eventually I found the sweet spot under the passenger seat next to the emergency wine bottles. I admired the sleek beauty of such a tiny being capable of wreaking such havoc in my car. And then I did the coup de grace endgame with my shoe.

Mouse Wars, redux

MAUSIAN DIARIES: MAUSGATE 9132013

9/3 It's officially Fall. Forget the equinox. The mice are back. A little early. I can't help but think they are foul weather predictors. Like little groundhogs. Apparently that lone August mouse was not an anomaly.

Over Labor Day weekend, the mice moved in and got cozy with the tea cozy and all my Rabbie Burns napkins. This won't do. Mice in the condiments/ tea drawer. I spend the morning pulling out kitchen drawers, and cleaning. TIme to dust off Victor-the-trap. If I can find it. Aha! Under the stove. Still set, patiently waiting all these years for a wayward mouse.

9/7 Gotcha! Good old Victor-the-trap, fit as a fiddle after years of benign neglect. Badda-boom! Can't say the same for my metal clippie mousetrap—a casualty of time. Rust is a great equalizer. I still have hope for my plastic clippie mousetrap—but my faith is eroding.

Uh-oh, the second one is a big mama mouse. Still nursing. There will be more. Mark my words.

91/2 All quiet on the mousy front. Victor-the-trap has been silent for days. Maybe I was lucky and got them all.

9/15 Oh no! Mouse poop on the cutting board. Fuck Rabbie Burns' To a Mouse. This is war. They've wiped out two old boxes of D-Con, but here's the dilemma: Dora the Cat is hanging out, so something's gotta go. Wow. I haven't checked out these cabinets in years. So that's where they went.

After a comical interlude where I asked the clerk for espejos (mirrors) instead of Miguel Ratóncito mouse traps in Spanish, I snagged two old-school mouse traps at the Dollar store. Do you know how hard it is to find old fashioned mousetraps? Now I get Build a better mousetrap. Otherwise, it's D-Con all the way, baby. Poison. Arsenic and old mice. But what about the environment? The outside cats? I'm uneasy about using all this poison.

My last major mouse invasion was Fall Equinox, 2009. See MOUSE WARS (warning: cute mouse pictures). Sure, we've had a few wayward mice since then. But nothing big. They never stuck around. Not like this.

9/17 Victor is victorious. But the knockoff mousetraps are worthless. I bumped Big Mama off, but Junior is still on the lam. Junior is the size of a quarter. Too small to trigger the traps, he snags the pecans and makes a run for it. What if he's carrying a disease?

How's that for a plague segue? I madly Google The Plague. No outbreaks reported—not even at Fallen Leaf Lake. I imagine I have symptoms like a pre-med student before exams. Swollen glands? That can't be good. No fleabites.

I have…a virus: oh, thankgawd. I also have acute hearing from my earache but not the cat reflexes to go with it. Probably a good thing or I'll be pouncing on the curtain and leaving little mouse prezzies on the doorstep for Neil.

I read up on house mice again. Definitely different than field mice. I learn that house mice (from Asia) are the same species as lab mice and pet store mice. And the chances of wild mice carrying disease are about the same as a pet hamster or rabbit. It's just that they poop all over the place. Now I'm afraid to use my cutting board. Three-seed baguette is out. Fennel seeds remind me of mouse turds.

Sorry, I'm not into those hav-a-heart traps. What's the point of live traps? All I'm doing by relocating the mice, is sicking vermin on unsuspecting neighbors. Too NIMBY. And all that goin' out to the country and feel-good wild release crap? Pl-ease! House mice are not native species. I repeat. Not native. Got it? They're from Asia, just like city rats. Introducing non-native species into a rural ecosystem is far worse than killing them in a humane manner. Besides, the mice won't even enter those live traps. Far too smart for that.

Bagged Mice

Why I bag the dead mice and pop them into the trash before somebody comes along to eat them is because they're probably pickled in poison. My neighbor feeds the birds—I mean she really FEEDS the birds gallons and gallons of birdseed falling on the ground which equals an exponential summer explosion of mice and rats.

At first I thought it was cute. All the baby mice playing on the picnic table. Until they moved into our cottages. Our manager thought otherwise, and squirreled D-Con poison traps under all the houses. This resulted in little mice staggering out for a drink before death. Mice who never drink water, dying of thirst, and arsenic, bleed to death, but the poison is still lethal—in mouse corpse form. We also have rats, cats, raccoons and 'possoms. So I bag the pickled mice. Ziplock snack bags make the best body bags. 

When the mice move in, at summer's end, I tend to go crazy popping them off with flipflops, or batting them to left field with long paper tubes—screaming some form of ju-jitsu, hairy-carrying on like a madwoman. They get into the house and chew chew chew paper. Then poop poop poop everywhere. Books, manuscripts, art., nothing is sacred. I use the old-fashioned snapping traps. No poison. Now my nights are filled with the sound of castenet-snapping mouse traps.

Petrified mouse

I'm nauseous after finding that errant dead mouse. The trap worked, but something fell over it and I didn't realize it had worked. Other than the smell.

Lauren Boyd McLachlan said At least it is not the days of olde where you'd keep it in the event of tooth ache... and apply it to your tooth! 

Toothache? Is that what I did wrong, forgot to apply dead mouse to it instead of getting my crown filled? Would've been a lot cheaper. I do have an earache. Awoke at 3:30 with an earache. Allergy gone awry with a vengeance. I yawn & try & pop my ear but no relief. Think it's a virus declaring itself.  Took Sudafed at 5 AM—just now getting some relief. But SO groggy.

Maureen Carden said One time we found a mummified rat hung up in the coils on the back of our old refrigerator. Our mummified rat looked like it had been there for a long time. We never noticed any smell. I was never one to spend much time dusting behind the fridge which was in the house when we moved in. Rat could have been there then. Ick.

Dusting behind the fridge is SO overrated. The mouse wasn't the only thing that was petrified. I wasn't about to reach in and grab the live trap. I dumped out all the other drawers but not that one as it's so big. Nuking drawer now. Still nauseous. Need a brain windshield wiper to erase the memory of daid dried mouse.

from a Facebook post, added 8/19

No Mouser, Jack

Ceilidh the young Siamese-tabby spent the other morning diligently staring and chatting at the bottom of the file cabinet. We took out the drawers, found nothing of interest—other than the usual odd lost things—so, that's where it went! No errant lizards. Eventually she was rewarded for her vigilance: a pink-eared field mouse staggered out in circles from under the cabinet, cute as a cartoon cutout.

With a spectacular leap, Ceiildh caught the dazed mouse, but then the marmalade cat, Jack stole it out from under her in midair. Then he brought the mouse into the living room to share his new toy with us. 

I have been bringing him new catnip and feather toys in order to make friends with him—he's very shy. I am clearly a danger. Not a certified petter. But he's thawing—I'm the bringer of toys. It's taken several weekends to convince him I've no plans to eat him. So he shows his appreciation by playing with his new toys.

Jack and Ceilidh waiting for the feathers to make a run for it.

Jack sat on the carpet and put down his new mouse toy to check it out—but it up and ran away on him. The perplexed look on his face was priceless. I laughed so hard, he got upset and lost track of the mouse.

Then my cousin Sinead leapt off the couch screaming like a banshee: get the mouse! Get the mouse! Jack, don't let it get away! as it made for the stairs, then it headed for the gap under Dave's bedroom door. Not a good outcome. He'd be really pissed off if a mouse moved in. Luckily, the bathroom door was wide open. Sinead headed them off and chased them both into the bathroom. 

Then Sinead threw a growling, hissing Ceilidh into the bathroom for good measure, and blocked off the bottom of the bathroom door with a towel. The bathroom was now the designated cat dungeon of shame. The only way out was a coup de grâce. Like that was going to happen.

But the field mouse must've escaped down the drainpipe hole in the sink cabinet. No other exit was possible and clearly the cats didn't eat him. Two confused cats now think the bathroom is possessed, or Sinead is. Or maybe both. Sort of like vacuum cleaners. Very bad objects.

Ceiildh spends her time hunting for that lost mouse, and mewling forlornly all over the house while Jack, the bum, keeps berzerking up and down the extra tall deluxe cat tree—nearly capsizing it. Some sort of a killer victory dance. 

Jack's a bit of a blond on a good day—he's not very clear on the subject of cat-and-mouse. He fetches his toy squirrels and catnip spider and brings them to Dave ever so nicely, chases feather wands, drags the big blue feather duster upstairs to attack and thump it like a mighty lion, blue feathers everywhere like pieces of fallen sky—but clearly, he's no mouser.

Jack, clearly he's no mouser. Not jack.

Ceilidh is inconsolable in her grief—somehow she knows that she's missed out on that big primal first kill. Bugs don't count anymore. Better luck next time. Hopefully she'll know what to do. Jack, well, he's another story. However, our feet poking out of beds in the middle of the night are fair game. And they must be punished.

Ceiildh = Caylee, means a party in Irish.

Sweeping the floor

About sweeping that kitchen floor—let's just say, I'm easily distracted. Call it ADD syndrome or short attention span. It began innocently enough last week with a light sweeping, then some damp mopping. Within the realm. Then I scraped off some white paint. OK. 

It's an old house from the 1920s, and the fake brick tile from the 1970s is crumbling at the seams. So I spackled some holes, it was whitey-white, so then I faux-painted the patches. 

I'm dangerous with paint. I start out all precise and neat, call it anal retentive, a dainty little patch job. Then something comes over me and gears shift. Vroom, I'm off! I become a demented Jackson Pollack with a paintbrush in hand. The graffiti tags on the bookshelf I just scored? No problem. Faux wood grain coming up. That hole in the wall that I keep trying to kill because it brings out my inner spider killer? Spackle (or toothpaste) is good.

It's a good thing I'm wounded, or I would've tackled rotted bathroom too. Turns me into a rather addled cross domestic war goddess. Moving the piano across the floor didn't help either. 

Since I can't bend my knee, getting down to floor level is an act of gravity—as in prostrate. Cross-legged is not an option. So I have to keep my leg straight out in front of me. It's a formidable barrier. I'm flexible, but not that flexible. Getting back up off the floor is a journey involving anti-gravity prayers and curses when those AG prayers don't hold. 

What possessed me to clean house, other than an acute attack of ADD, was that I could smell Autumn in the air, even though it is still July. Something about the changing light invokes an inexplicable sadness, or melancholia as the fall approaches. Or maybe it was the odor of dead mouse.

So as I was cleaning house a little here, a little there—oh, shiny! What was I doing? Takes me ages to complete simple tasks. I was dying for a cup of tea. The pilot light blew out on the stove. Hours later, I've dismantled the entire stovetop and counter, scraped off a decade of grunge from under the burners. Cleaned the greasy spice jars too. Tea? What tea? Can't reach the oven unless I use a chair and there's only so much I'm willing to do. 

I've been flopping down like a a fish and rolling about like a drunken narwhal to get from point A to B, while swearing like a sailor. Rearranging my computer space with all the plugs on the floor (and in tight corners) involved a lot of groveling and snorting of dustbunnies. 

My physical therapist said, So don't clean house! Like that was an option.

But there's only so many months you can go it alone before the floor turns to foot-velcro. It all began when a mouse left turds on the breadboard. That's a call to war if ever there was one. Traps, poison, shoes—I'm a shameless hunter when it comes to mice. 

I think a mouse died under the sink (good old D-con makes them thirsty so they seek out water.) but I can't get down on the floor and under the sink with my leg out in front of me like a freakin' log to check it out unless I lie flat on a skateboard. The dog pose is not an option.

Don't even get me started on the fridge. It's jealous and wants my attention too. I know this because it pees on the floor.


A link:
MOUSE WARS