We are dealing with an unpleasant infestation. It all began a few weeks ago when we heard a rustling in our rubbish bin as we ate our breakfast cereal. A mouse had managed to push out the steel wool I'd used to stuff the holes in the back of the cupboard where the bin resides, and had fallen into the bin.
I felt sorry for it on a number of counts:
Firstly the mouse couldn't get out of the bin and had been unsuccessfully trying to climb out, potentially for an entire night.
Further, it hadn't benefited from its efforts in the slightest. The bin had nothing in it save one empty packet of chocolate teddy bear biscuits.
Finally, mousy met a sticky end at the hands of my husband. We have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy concerning the destruction of pests around the house so I know none of the details. I can only presume that it was swift and painless.
We are now seeking to kill the mouse population with "talon" poison. We've stuck a little cube of it in the cupboard with the bin, and one in a hard to reach (humanly speaking) corner of the pantry. Thankfully the one in the pantry hasn't been touched. However the one near the bin has been nibbled and moved around a lot. The poison can take up to two weeks to knock them off, so we'll need to be a bit patient.
We will also need to find ways to reassure visitors who hear strange banging noises coming from our kitchen cupboards. Last night at a Bible study we were hosting, a soon to be dead mouse decided that it was going to noisily play with the cube of talon during a moment of quiet discussion about the application of a potentially sensitive passage from the Bible (Col 3:18-4:1). We had split the group down gender lines for this time and I think that the lack of male voices in the room meant that mousy felt emboldened to have a play.
After 10-15 minutes of hoping it would settle down, I fessed up to the girls about the noise. Thankfully no one was too grossed out and one of them reassuringly told a story about mice that can scale the outer wall of ten story apartment blocks in the country that she originally comes from. It puts a few little ones in the under sink cupboard into perspective.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
mousy mousy
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I'm impressed at the level of detail and photos etc! Could it be due to the fact that you're no longer writing essays, so you have a spare bit of room in your brain for thinking about writing non-study related things? :P Even if I'm wrong, I'm still impressed. Even though some would say it's voyeuristic, I find it good to hear about the "everday ordinariness" of others' lives. It's also great that you have "healthy" interests i.e. gardening outside work/study, more than I can say for some of us (myself included).
I find that if you give the mouse a cute name (I called mine Nibbles) and tell your visitors it's your 'pet' mouse, they will be more accepting. (Or maybe they will just think you are weird).
I feel that we should call him Boris! Though he's prob dead by now, so a name could be a moot point.
Post a Comment