We're Infested

I have been sitting here for days on end thinking I had nothing to blog about. Then I realized that I forgot to tell the story about our mouse infestation. Warning to super animal lovers, this involves the death of the critters.

First off, some of you may or may not know, that we live in an 80 year old house. Plaster walls a little drafty and all that jazz. You also know that we had our garage torn down and rebuilt, that's old news.

Well it seems that around the time of the tearing down, we got a few mice in the house. We figured it was from the destruction of the garage because we saw mice scurrying out of it when it came down. The monkey had seen one scurry under the oven once or twice, so I got some mouse traps that are supposed to be all nice and easy. They mice are supposed to go inside this round plastic thing and the trap closes on them trapping them inside, so you don't have to see them and you just throw the whole thing out.

Well these traps suck and I think the mice thought so too and would dance around them in joy and mocking.

We didn't see any mice, so we figured from lack of food that they had gone. Until about a month ago. The monkey was going nuts around the floor cabinet by her food bowl. She was scratching and crying and sniffing like a lunatic. So I decided to investigate.

I pulled the drawer out and I found a whole bunch of junk underneath. Old papers and towels and trash from the previous owner. And within all that lovely stuff was mouse shit. I groaned. I pulled everything out and cleaned up the whole area, meanwhile the dog is still going out of her mind. Then I decided to investigate the other drawers. In each and every drawer was mouse shit. In the towel drawer in one of the towels was mouse shit and dog food. The little fuckers were taking the dog food and hiding in the drawers to eat it. In the bottom drawer I found that they were storing the dog food in the trash bag box, so they didn't have to expose themselves to get a snack.

This pissed me off and I decided it was war.

I went out and got the old fashioned spring loaded traps. And I preceded to put them under every drawer and behind the water cooler by the monkey's bowl. And then I waited.

By the evening I had caught 2.

That night the monkey was crying and sniffing by the vent in our bedroom. I thought great now they are upstairs, where there is NO food at all. But we had an advantage, our upstairs bathroom tub has an access door in the stairwell. So I opened that up and from there you can see all the ceiling beams and I thought maybe they were traveling across the ceiling and up and down the pipes to the basement. So I put a trap in there. Within 5 minutes we had another one and the dog was going nuts again.

So I set all the traps again and tried to go to bed.

A few nights later, we heard a trap go off and then a scraping clunking noise as it crawled across the ceiling. We think maybe it's tail or a foot just got caught and it was making an attempt to get away. That was creepy.

We also somehow lost 3 traps. We put them in the access hole and when we went to check on them, they were gone. I was beginning to think that they were plotting against us and learning how to make a trap and turn it on us. However, within 2 weeks we had killed 12 mice. And added to our onslaught by putting out 4 boxes of poison, 2 of which were completely eaten. Who knows how many died from it. It had been a week since we caught any, so I checked the access behind the tub yesterday and there was another dead one! That brings our count to at least 13 and who knows if they are gone.

Since the weather is getting better, I think we are going to go around the basement and outside and see if there are any spaces that need to be filled to keep them from getting in. Cause it's just getting gross now.