This past fall, we had what we’re now referring to as “Mouse Mayhem 2010”. Yes, we DID have a rat in our front yard also. We are possibly the most vile human beings on earth. (But we’re not!! I SWEAR! Your kids can come over for a play date and they can eat snacks off the floor. Literally, they can eat the old Cheerios that are crusted to the floor. Maybe some chocolate sprinkles, too, if they’re lucky, and smashed veggie booty. No matter how much I sweep I’ve resigned myself to the fact that my floors are going to be crunchy. I’m ok with that.)
Anyway, we’ve lived in our apt for 6 years and had never, EVER seen a mouse until October. Pete insists that a mouse used to visit him in the living room occasionally late at night while he was watching TV/playing Call Of Duty/engaging in nerdy wizard games on his iPhone, but I NEVER saw one, and I’m pretty sure he just saw a dog hair dust bunny wafting by. It definitely wasn’t some phantom mouse who only liked to stalk him. Please.
All of a sudden one night while lying in bed we heard (translation: I heard, with my supersonic bat ears while Pete snored away) what seemed to be teensy scratches. After trying to rouse the 80 pound dog on the bed to make sure her nails weren’t tapping on the walls during one of those wiggly dreams where her feet move as if she’s dreaming of chasing frisbees, I ran to the kitchen, flicked on the light and saw a lone mouse scurry across the floor. I yelped, jumped about two feet into the air and SPRINTED back into the bedroom as if an entire colony of mice were chasing me and nipping at my ankles. We spent (again: I spent, since Pete could snore away even if a 747 took off from under the bed) the rest of the night obsessing and counting the seconds until I could call the landlord in the morning.
First thing in the morning my husband ran out to pick up some sticky traps and we laid them down under the oven and fridge, and when I say “some”, I mean he BLANKETED the space with sticky traps with a tiny pile of chocolate chips in the center of each one. Have you heard? Mice are into chocolate chips. Especially fancy Ghirardelli ones. The traps were set, Pete headed off to work and my daughter and I sat down to breakfast.
Squeak! Squeak!
“I HEAR A MOUSE!! AWWW!!” Lotte shouted out with glee.
Darting into the kitchen I came to a screeching halt when my eyes met the teeny dark peepers of the tiniest mouse ever. Like, the cutest little baby mouse. It was fucking Fievel, or maybe Stuart Little. My animal-loving vegetarian mind went into emotional OCD overdrive, and I decided I would be SCARRED FOR LIFE if he got stuck on one of the traps. I HAD TO SAVE FIEVEL! STEP AWAY FROM THE GHIRARDELLI! The second I broke my freeze, however, the little bugger darted under the fridge, jonesing for chocolate, and got stuck. Squeak! Squeak! I burst into tears and called my husband, hysterically demanding he come home and put the poor thing out of it’s misery because it was HIS IDEA to lay down these inhumane traps, and I couldn’t possibly kill Fievel. Although a small part of me was kind of thinking, “YAY! We caught the mouse! It’s over!”.
It wasn’t over. That evening, 4 more mice came for the chocolate chips and got stuck. FOUR. I was a disaster. As we tried to go to bed I could hear them in the walls and ceiling above us. We were being overrun, like that horror movie about spiders, except this was somehow worse*. The scurrying and scratching and tapping: I didn’t sleep a wink. The landlord came over first thing in the morning and went throughout the entire apartment sealing up any possible place they could be coming from. He ripped out the oven, the dishwasher and the fridge. He was under the sink and in every room: filling in the tiniest holes around every single radiator. He used a combination of steel wool and this foamy spray goo that hardened. It was SO mouse proof. It HAD to be!
It wasn’t. That night by 11pm we heard the familiar, maddening death scratches in the walls. I hadn’t slept in about 36 hours. We had eaten pretty much every meal out because I refused to go into the kitchen. Really, as far as I saw it, our only options were to
A. Move into a hotel forever like Dylan McKay.
B. Check me into a private room at Bellevue because I was going INSANE, or
C. start our own reality show called, “The Grossest Shit Ever”.
That night and the next day, we caught 6 more mice for a grand total of 11 in 3 days. ELEVEN!!! From zero in six years to 11 in 3 days! Pete had morphed into the Pol Pot of rodents (I won’t get into details of how he did it once they were stuck, but I can assure you they died very quickly), and by #3 I didn’t demonstrate the emotional compassion I had for that first one. I was no longer weeping for Fievel. FUCK FIEVEL AND HIS WHOLE FUCKING FAMILY. At one point that night while we were staring at a small mouse that was writhing on a trap, another fatso came strutting out right in front of us and, in an effort to pry the chocolate chips from under his mouse friend’s stuck body, he flung himself right onto the same trap. It. Was. A. NIGHTMARE.
The landlord called his exterminator who came in and laid bits of poison in strategic areas. This guy was like Ace Ventura of nasty creatures, and he was able to find the most microscopic entryways where he could spot where the GREASE FROM THEIR FUR RUBBED OFF ON THE WOOD (Gag! Retch!). That night we heard a little scurrying in the walls, but didn’t catch any. The following night: silence. Nothing. We were told that with poison you often get the stench of dead mice emanating from your walls, unless they left the house entirely. Thankfully we didn’t smell anything, and the ordeal was over. It was 3 days of pure hell.
Turns out my next-door neighbor had just had an exterminator come plug up holes for what she swears were “squirrels” in her roof that had been coming out at night. Right. I’m sure they were “squirrels”. Literally, the following night Mouse Mayhem 2010 began in our apartment, and the neighbor on their other side had a few mice as well.
The moral: if you live in the city around neighbors who have (ahem) “squirrels”, get a cat. Dogs don’t do shit.
*On second thought, NOTHING would be worse than having your home overrun by spiders, especially daddy long legs. BARF.
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