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Mice

Mice in the House

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Decorating for the holidays is not one of my favorite things to do, especially when you make the discovery you have mice in the house at the same time.

I wish I was one of those women who look forward to the holidays, who has the house perfectly decorated by the night of Thanksgiving, who constantly boils apple juice and cinnamon sticks and cloves just to make the house smell nice, who passes out all the Christmas goodies to her neighbors by the first weekend of December, and who has all the Christmas gifts purchased and wrapped by the end of October.  I’m just not that kind of woman.

I’m more the type of person who gets annoyed at all the unnecessary parties I have to plan or attend, and at the loss of every single weekend in December.  I have an Oh-Crap moment about the second week of December and pull out the dusty holiday decoration boxes that are completely disorganized after last year’s desperate holiday clean up attempt in the middle of January.  I have a second Oh-Crap moment about the third week of December when I have to finally finish all my holiday shopping, and end up getting gift cards for more than half the people on my list.

So, when I pulled out the box containing the pre-lit Christmas tree, I sighed for about the hundredth time that day.  I would have to rearrange the furniture in the front room so I could somehow fit this tree in there.  I would have to assemble the tree and make sure all the lights still worked.  I’d have to fluff out the branches in a sad attempt to make it look like a real tree, while trying to avoid scratching my arms too badly.  I’d have to sort through my tree decorations, toss the ones that broke during last year’s packing, and make it look festive enough.  I did this so my kids could enjoy Christmas.  I did not personally enjoy it.  So, I did the basic decorating while the kids were at school so they wouldn’t see my “Bah Humbug” attitude.

I reached in the box to pull out the first part of the tree, and gasped when my hand touched something soft that moved.  Then I had one of those delay-screams.  You know, when you scream after you realize what exactly happened, and then you have to wait until you have enough breath to get the scream out.  I’d touched a mouse.  Matter of fact, I’d touched several mice.  There was a nest in my Christmas tree box!

The mice were just as terrified and surprised as I was, because they jumped out of the box and scattered.  I now had mice in my house.  I continued screeching as I ran into the bathroom and locked the door.  Plunging my hand into water as hot as I could stand, I realized my cell phone was in the other room.  I’d have to brave the mice just to call for help.  Hopefully, I could get someone to my house before the kids came home so we could get rid of the mice before they had to know about it.

Merry Christmas.

I’m not decorating next year.

Mice

Mouse in the House

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how to get rid of mice

I rely on my two cats to tell me anytime there’s the faintest chance of a mouse in the house.  After the experience I had two winters ago, I still hate to put my hand into any container that has food in it, without inspecting it first.  Two years ago, I was storing a fifty-pound bag of potatoes in the garage.  We’d found a great deal on potatoes, but I had nowhere to store it in the house, so we kept it in the cold garage.  I figured that was the best place for something like that anyway.  Didn’t they used to store potatoes in cold cellars in the old days?

 

I was going to make mashed potatoes for dinner that night, so I padded out into the garage, reached my hand into the large bag and groped around, and was shocked beyond belief when my hand closed on a stiff, furry object instead of the smooth surface of a potato.  Turns out it was a mouse that had crawled into the bag and died.

 

Now, we own two cats, and guess where they sleep at night?  In our garage.  I don’t want another mouse in the house, garage, or anywhere else in my home, for that matter.  We haven’t had an incident ever since we got the cats.

 

But now, I have the worst suspicion that those mouse-free days may be over.  For the last week, every time I let the cats into the garage for the night, they immediately crouch down and peer under our tool cabinet.  Occasionally, they’ll swipe a paw around down there.  I’m convinced that we may have a mouse in the house, or maybe even a mouse nest.  As the days have passed this week, I was certain that our two cats would eventually take care of the problem.  After all, whenever I let them outside, they always return with a “present” for me.  Of course, I am probably less enthusiastic about the dead mice gifts than my cats are, but that’s beside the point.  I know they’re good mousers.  So, why do we have a mouse in the house?

 

Surely these cats will take care of the problem without any further action on my part.  I can’t stand the idea of “padding” out into the garage in my bare feet, just to walk over mouse droppings, or have a startled creature scamper across my toes.  Worst, my hand still spasms involuntarily whenever I think about what I pulled out of that potato bag.

 

But, as the days have gone on, the cats still stalk the tool cabinet, but they have nothing to present to me.  Why would a mouse stay in a house with two cats, unless they have an alternate and safe way to get in and out?

 

So, instead of relying on pets to take care of the mouse problem for me, I’m calling Allstate Animal Control.  I’d be a lot happier knowing they’ve gotten rid of all the mice for me, and my cats can go back to just sleeping in the garage.

 

 

Mice

Pest Removal

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As a teenage girl, I loved my job at a cute clothing store in the mall, except for inventory and pest removal day.  Sure, most of my paycheck ended up going towards clothes that we sold in the store, but that was completely worth it to me!  I got a great employee discount, and my money would have been spent on clothes, anyway.

The very worst part of the job was inventory.  Every few months, we had to go in extremely early on a Saturday morning so we could check off every item the store owned, clear out shelves to prepare them for the next line of clothes to arrive, and clean out the storage room.  It was a long day, boring, and full of hard work.  And the storage room was awful.

The room was windowless, lit with bluish fluorescent lights, and packed with boxes, unused hangers, clothing racks and dusty shelves.  We called it the dungeon.  Over the previous months, we used it as a dumping ground for whatever we didn’t want to take care of during our normal shifts, and inventory day was payback.  We sorted, we cleaned, and we were always on the lookout for spiders, bugs, or worse, mice or rats.  Pest Removal just wasn’t included on the job description when we’d applied as sales associates.  But, there we were, mouse traps, rat poison, and fly swatters close by as we sorted, folded, and discarded everything that had been tossed into the dungeon.  Once the place was cleaned up, we’d set out the rat poison near suspected rat holes and place a couple of mouse traps in the corners of the room, just to be on the safe side.

Of course, we always had to give the new girls a bad time.  In the days leading up to inventory, we’d tell them horror stories of a mouse that ran over someone’s foot, or the biggest spider we’d ever seen.  Inventory Day, we’d rig it up so plastic rats would be pulled across the floor with a string, or throw a toy spider into someone’s hair.  Didn’t I mention that it was a long and boring day?  We had to break it up somehow!

One Inventory Day, we all arrived, as usual, in our sweats and hair pulled back into ponytails, ready to get dusty, filthy and be bored to tears counting and sorting.  We got our initial assignments from the store manager, and headed off to our respective jobs for the morning.  I was unfortunate enough to get stuck in the storage room right away, bypassing the lesser evil of clearing off shelves in the front.  I got ready to break down the empty boxes so I could stack them up and take them out to the dumpster, and grabbed a box from off the top of the pile.  I pulled it towards me and pulled out the box cutter, just as I became aware of the awful rustling noise coming from inside the box.  Startled, I dropped it on the floor, causing a couple of the flaps to fall up and out, giving me a great view of the box’s interior.  To my disgust, it was filled with wriggling little pink bodies of mouse babies amongst shredded material and cardboard that served as their nest.  My screams brought every girl into the back room, most of whom ran right back out as they realized what they were seeing.  To this day, I can’t open an empty box without shuddering.  Pest removal is something best left to the professionals, not a teenage girl working at a clothing shop.