// newmodernscience

So, for a month now we’ve been having issues with mice. or rather mouse. At first, I wasn’t sure it was a mouse to begin with. I’d just been seeing a blur from time to time, once in the kitchen, once in the living room. I’d told Carey about it, and she thought she’d see something a few times, but nothing confirmed.

Well that all changed 3 weeks ago when I was in the sink looking for some dish towels and found some droppings on them. mmm. I kind of ignored it for a couple of weeks until Carey saw it in Maren’s bedroom, and then we both saw it in the living room several times. I ignored it again, until the following Saturday. Carey and I were taking a nap on the couch, she was on one end and I was on the other. I like to dig my feet into the cushions, so I fell asleep that way. About 20 minutes later, I felt something nibbling at my feet, and we both sprung up. At that point I was willing to do something. Oddly enough, I really didn’t feel threatened by the little guy, but all the same having mice around isn’t great. So, I went ahead and bought some snap traps and baited them. Well, the next day there were EMPTY. hmm. I baited them again, this time heavier. Again, they were empty. I did this several times for a week, and the silly thing never set them off. THEN, the cheeky little guy had the gall to come out while we were still up and go steal cheese from the traps while we were watching him. I even staked him out to watch him and see how big he was. Pretty tiny. So, next I made a gravity trap, to see if he’d fall for that. I got a bucket out, and built a ramp up the edge of it. Then, I got a toilet paper roll, put some PB on the end, and balanced it on the edge of the ramp. The mouse goes up, in the tube, and before he can reach the end, the tube falls in to the bucket with the mouse, right? Next time i’ll try a paper towel roll, because this guy would just knock the roll into the bucket every night. So, next I tried a zapper. You put in batteries and peanut butter in the back, and when it crawls in there to get the PB, it completes the circuit, and it politely zaps the unsuspecting mousie. The only problem is, this is a smart mousie and he completely avoided it for a week despite a full panel of different baits. THEN, we tried ultrasonic deterrents. You plug them into the walls, and they emit ultrasonic pulses that are supposed to drive mouse and rats crazy. Well, that seemed to work, until Carey came out of the shower Sunday morning to be greeted by said mousie running into the door. Needless to say she freaked. I really didn’t want to do poison, because I didn’t want it to crawl up and die in a vent someplace. So my last try were glue trays. By this point, we’d spent some $70 on this little guy, it was sorta like buying a pet. Anyway, I put out the trays last night, and Lo and BEHOLD! He was stuck in one of the trays trying to eat my PB. Unfortunately, he was still alive when I had to dispose of him, which made me really sad. He was squeaking so pathetically. I mean, he never really caused us any harm, it seemed so mean to have to kill him. They say that you can use vegetable oil and free them from the glue trays, but I really didn’t want to take the chance on him getting back in. Goodbye, mousie. We loved thee well.

Oh, it gets better. Carey calls me the next day while i’m at work, and says that she’s seen another under the computer desk someplace. I told her to grab the flashlight and to take a distance peek at it. Turns out that there were TWO stuck to another trap that I had stuck down there, and then an hour later she caught another one. I suspected that they were coming from the couch, given that all of our traps had been near the couch. We had been given this couch by a friend at the church, and they live out in the country a ways, next to a field, and this couch had been in the garage for about 8 months. Things were starting to make sense.

That night Carey and Maren were watching Cinderella in her room, and hear Carey calling for me at a high whisper. I peeked in, and she said that they had seen one behind Maren’s entertainment center. I laid out a couple of traps in the corner, and left. 10 minutes later, she called me in again, and one had gotten trapped, but another one had scurried under Maren’s bed. This one, I actually chased. I corralled it toward the far corner where all of Maren’s stuffed animals were, and started pulling them out to the middle. Underneath, I found LOTS of droppings, and the mouse in the corner. I guess we were giving them a nice little warm place with a pile of stuffed animals. Anyway, I chased it back and forth a few times, and finally got the glue trap in the corner, chased it back and trapped it. THEN, I saw a couple more head towards Maren’s closet. At this point, it seemed that this order would never end. I pulled everything out of the closet, and chased it into it. I caught 1 in a corner, and saw the second one dive into a hole under a bit of carpet in the back of the closet. With a closer look, I saw that there was a whole 4×4 inch square of carpet missing, and they were diving run under the padding underneath. guh. So, I caught one more that night, and staked out another that had ran into our room. He ended up getting away into our closet someplace. I pulled everything out of that, and laid some more traps and let it it go at that. Two days later, we caught one more, and we haven’t seen any more. Dad came over and we pulled the couch outside, and pulled the dust cover off of the back of it. We didn’t find any nests or anything, but I left it in the garage all the same. He also stuffed some some metal mesh down in the carpeting in Maren’s room, and hopefully that’ll stem the problem. We’ll know better in a few weeks. For now though, I have 8 traps set, including some of the really big rat sized ones.