Random old memory #4
Years ago, before Billy and Matt were even in school, we lived in a tiny rental house in SE Portland. The house was really old and drafty, and we soon discovered we had a mouse problem. Before even getting in touch with the landlord, I figured I’d try to be mister responsible and take care of the problem myself, and I bought half a dozen or so mouse traps. These were the old fashioned, spring loaded, wood-base, Tom and Jerry cartoon style mouse traps.
We knew we had mice in the house because the boys’ pet hamster’s food was being eaten. (This was the replacement hamster, by the way, after the first one was found teats up in his cage early one morning for no apparent reason.) See, the hamster was a picky eater, and would only eat certain seeds from his bowl of expensive pet store brand hamster food, and he would shove the rest of the food (usually dried corn kernels) out of his cage, where it would gather on the top of the dresser until Kathy or I would clean it up. At some point we started noticing droppings outside the cage, and along the walls on the dresser and the floor, and so we knew that a mouse was coming in and eating the hamster’s rejects.
So I set the traps, and loaded them with, what else, swiss cheese. (Seriously, everything I knew about unwanted rodents, I learned from cartoons.) The cheese was never touched, and dried out and got moldy, but we knew the mice were still around, because we were still seeing droppings along the baseboards.
I next loaded up the spring traps with peanut butter. Same result, mouse ignores the peanut butter, still eats the hamsters rejected corn kernels. By the way, the irony of trying (unsuccessfully) to kill an apparently intelligent rodent with a strong sense of self-preservation that ate the unwanted rejected hamster food, while at the same time trying to keep alive another rodent that didn’t appreciate the food I worked so hard to put in his food bowl, and that was seemingly so fragile that a stiff overnight breeze would kill him, was lost on me.
Anyway, for round three, I tried embedding the corn kernels in the peanut butter. The next morning, the traps weren’t sprung, there were little kernel shaped holes in the blobs of peanut butter where the corn used to be, and more droppings along the walls. These were the same traps that took me like 15 minutes each to arm, and that would snap and spray me with peanut butter if I so much as looked at them the wrong way.
Finally, I gave up, and had the landlord bring over some kind of poison traps he set up around the perimeter of the house. Within a few days, there were no more visits from Jerry or his friends.
The best part of all this, however, was how jumpy Kathy was when she knew that there were rodents running around our house at will. She was taking a shower one day, and I sneaked into the bathroom, reached my hand into the tub under the shower curtain, and very gently tickled her toes while her face was lathered up and she couldn’t see anything. I think she might have actually left shampoo on the ceiling from how high she jumped. Oh, and I was very lonely for the next couple weeks, if you get my drift.
I sometimes wonder why Kathy still loves me…
3 comments July 25th, 2005