A Better Mouse Trap?
- Posted by Melissa on May 20th, 2008 filed in daily life
Sunday is my laundry day every week. Even though I’m a singularly terrible housekeeper, I do think it’s good to have a particular laundry routine so that your laundry doesn’t stack up and get unmanageable. If you want to keep up with things and not look like a total slob, it’s important. So a few weeks ago my laundry routine was turned upside down when I put a load in, got on the phone, and began talking with my crafty friend about something like embroidery or some such.
A few minutes later, my boyfriend called me in the kitchen before rushing into the other room for some towels, so I hung up the phone and went to tend to the emergency. It turned out that the machine had overflowed. “I think you may have overfilled it,” my boyfriend said. I thought so, too. We’d used more towels during the week than usual and I decided to try and chance it. We pulled some of the sopping laundry out, reset the machine, and started the cycle over again. After another fifteen minutes, it did it again. We played with it for another half hour, testing different cycles and so on, before we decided that something was seriously wrong with the machine, since it wasn’t ever starting the agitation cycle at all. Also, the cylinder didn’t seem to be…quite right.
So my crafty friend’s cousin was able to recommend a repair person. I owe this man a lot, because when he came to the house, opened up the machine, and found a mouse nest inside, complete with mouse, he did not make any comments about how we were dirty people with a disgusting home and vermin living inside our major appliances.
We have some mouse repelling electronic things that allegedly emit high pitched sounds that rodents can’t stand, but I’m not sure if they work well or not, since last week the mice got into a bag of chocolate chips I had left out and they ate the whole fucking thing and left only turds in place of the chocolate and I had to make my chocolate chip blondies without the chocolate chips since I didn’t discover their crime until I had already made the batter. I wish chocolate was deadly poison to mice.
Mice and I are going to war now.
May 20th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
All the noise things ever did was drive mice out of our garage into the house itself.
I suggest using the green poison pellets to take care of em.
May 20th, 2008 at 11:22 pm
At my old house, when we renovated the kitchen, we pulled out the stove and found a little electrocuted, mummified mouse corpse hanging off the back.
In retrospect, it was pretty funny. I mean, not for the mouse…
May 21st, 2008 at 12:51 pm
I think the stuff I used was called ‘onebite’, but I had rats and not mice. Big, honking, scary rats. I caught 3 in rat traps (the bigger, deadlier version of the mousetrap kind) until they grew wise to them and avoided them like crazy from then on out. I even threw out the old traps, in case they reeked of rat corpse, but they never fell for the new ones. They were nesting in my attic and I could hear them running around over the ceiling of different rooms. I went up into the attic and tossed the one bite out in chunks in all directions, problem solved.
Oh, and I tried the green poison pellets first - they fuckers actually GNAWED INTO the bags I didn’t use and ATE THEM. I think they were letting me know that those things were tasty, as a week after that I still had rats.
May 21st, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Death to the little bastards!
Question: as a kid, did you ever play the game Mousetrap as it was meant to be played, or did you (like me and all my friends) just set up the trap and trigger it over, and over, and over again?
May 23rd, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Hrm. Ya know, I think I played it the right way, some. But I do recall just setting it up and triggering it over and over again as well.
June 2nd, 2008 at 9:14 am
Here is a Public Service Announcement for everyone who lives in a house: DON’T USE POISON INDOORS. Do you want a mouse to eat poison, run into the walls, and die there? Their smell just emanates through and you end up having to tear the wall away to find the little rotters. I thought this was common sense but I learned otherwise when the site supervisor at my work had to rip a couple feet square out of the breakroom wall to find the source of a really disgusting smell.
If you’re laying traps and haven’t yet, make sure to leave them around for a few weeks without setting them, but bait them every few days anyway (peanut butter’s good, because it forces the mouse to interact more with the trap). Get the little buggers used to getting food off the traps, THEN start setting them.
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:20 pm
I was afraid to lie poison out anyway, because my dog isn’t very smart and I can easily see her snacking on some of it. It would be a shame to have her drop dead suddenly.
You idea about feeding them off the traps is so incredibly genius - and simple, too! It’s one of those things that seems really obvious after someone else points it out to you. I think the mouse tide has subsided, but if I start seeing droppings in the kitchen I’m going to do like you suggest.