Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Ghosts! or, you know. Mice.

I've long suspected we had mice-- or at least that some other creature was wandering around our house in the wee hours. I did at one point get a call from the electrician where he said, "You wanna see some big ole bugs?" and he proceeded to direct me to a water roach nest in the back yard. We mercilessly sprayed them down with Raid, against the electrician's suggestions of pouring gasoline on them (probably would have worked better, but sadly, would have been more expensive), but I imagine we may have to deal with their infiltration into the house at some point...

Anyway, when I was painting the bathroom all those weeks ago, each time I put a new coat on, I would clean up the floor-- on my hands and knees!!-- until no more drips remained, and call it done. I then would leave the paint tray in the floor so it could dry up and I wouldn't have to deal with paint disposal or with spraying red water all over my grass. Then I would leave the house.

And when I'd return, after a week or more, I'd find smeared drips on the floor. Every time. I'll admit, I may have missed them when I was cleaning, because, let's be honest, my eyesight's not what it used to be, and that's a busy floor. But they were mouse paw sized (or so I judged using my forensic mouse paw expertise). I went with the theory that either we had mice or the water roaches were doing some scouting missions.

This weekend we found mouse droppings in the garage.

And last night, I had ANOTHER anxiety dream, in which I returned to the house to find all my base shoe tumped on the garage floor, stuck to each other and covered in dirt. The mice had rioted. Then I decided that mice couldn't have done this and it had to be

A possum infestation.**

Ugh. We have to get our new mattress and soon. 5 nights on a worn out futon mattress and last night in my old one is going to give me a heart attack. And a herniated disc.

**Incidentally, my dog kills possums. He's kind of a badass like that-- the uber protector dog in a relatively compact little package. Unfortunately, that means I have to clean up the dead mess. Do. Not. Want.

3 comments:

Our Little Bungalow said...

Good luck with that. I hate MICE. So does my dtr, hearing them in the wall in the middle of the night creeps her out.....bad.......

libby said...

We had mice too. They actually tunneled into the couch to come up between the cushions to find the dog food that our chihuahua would loose there. Needless to say the dog is no longer allowed to roam free with her kibbles.
I went out and got the devices that are supposed to make a high pitch noise that drives them away because all i could think of when looking at the mouse traps was Stella's (the chihuahua) babies being the same size as mice. but those didn't seem to bother them so i considered poison but i think our routing around in the attic and vacuuming their nests out of the walls (including socks, thats where all of those missing socks go) has made them move on. I hope.

Joanne said...

OMG--the mystery of missing socks solved!

We had mice once before, and set up a few of those electronic devices in the basement, along with a good supply of poison. I'm not sure which drove them off eventually, or if it was combination of the two, but it's been years since we've had problems.