to jwgh's talk.bizarre writings
From: jwgh at earthlink.net (Jacob Haller) Subject: Mouse Date: 25 May 2000 Message-ID: <1eb73r3.dftszyftczwxN%jwgh@earthlink.net> Newsgroups: talk.bizarre(Or, "at least I'm not contributing to a cascade.")
My apartment has mice. My landlord (who lives downstairs from me and has several dogs and cats) appears to be under the impression that there is only one mouse, but this seems unlikely to me. (It's not like mouse are outgoing creatures that love showing themselves off. Instead they're proverbial meek, retiring creatures, so it seems to me that if you manage to catch sight of one there are probably a bunch more you didn't see.) So far they don't appear to be eating my food; they mostly seem to be passing through, a task made easy by the fact that my apartment has a large number of holes of various sizes in the floor.
When I first discovered the mice (or mouse if you subscribe to my landlord's theory) I was struck by a sudden urge to get a cat. This took me a bit by surprise as I thought I had decided over the past five years or so that not having a cat was kind of a nice experience; cats are nice, but in some ways not having one is nicer. I thought this was pretty much settled. But no, as soon as any kind of excuse pops up my first thought is: "Get a cat." I even started making up a mental list of the pros and cons of having a cat vs. having mice:
etc.
Finally I decided that even if I was going to get a cat I wasn't going to do so right away, particularly as a friend who's allergic to cats was planning to stay at my apartment for a few days in a couple of weeks.
So. What to do about the mice in the interem? I wasn't particularly thrilled about traps, though I briefly considered using a Hav-A-Hart-type trap and releasing the mice over on the East Side, a nicer neighborhood than the one I inhabit and one that coud maybe use a few extra mice. A more appealing idea was to get some steel wool and plug up at least the more obvious holes. (Moving the fridge wasn't particularly appealing either.) So the other night I tried to buy some steel wool. Foolishly I went to a grocery store and so I ended up with steel wool-based pot scrubbers. Oh, well, hopefully they would do. I went home and plugged up the holes I could find.
One of the holes is not a hole per se; it's a gap between the fireplace and the wooden structure that surrounds it, the name of which I forget. I'm not sure if there's actually a hole behind this wooden thing that allows the mice to escape altogether, or if there's just a small space that gives the mice a place to chill while they're avoiding The Man, but definately a few mice have scurried away into there. I couldn't fill the whole crack, so I just stuffed one of the steel wool scrubbies into the bottom of the crack and hoped that that would do. This was done last night.
Just now I saw my first mouse since the installation of the steel wool. It came around the corner (probably from the hole in the floor of the kitchen, where I observe that the steel wool has been pushed out of the way) and saw me (or perhaps heard me; I've developed a habit of saying "Mouse!" when I see one which is probably something I should try to discontinue), and tried to dash away to its traditional hidey-hole by the fireplace.
But wait! Its path was blocked. It stopped dead, puzzled by this turn of events. After a few seconds it turned and dashed to the back of the fireplace. But this didn't really appeal either, apparently. Quickly it ran back, leaped up as far as it could, and went over the mound of steel wool, touching it as little as possible.
My conclusion is that the steel wool approach doesn't necessarily work that great, at least unless you use more steel wool than I had access to. But I think it might work nicely in conjunction with, say, a cat, which could grab the mouse while it was trying to figure out what to do now that the entrance to its old retreat was blocked with a nasty, scratchy substance. Waddaya think?
-jwgh
--
"Sort of makes you long for the days when humanity was just one simple
little button push away from nuclear devastation, doesn't it?"
- Gary Cooper, alt.tech-support.recovery 9/20/96