We should have thought about our coexistence with mice when we first saw the mice in the backyard, that was a strong hint. I don’t know why all of us were naïve and ignored the signal.
That was one Saturday in the mid summer, we stood in deck, looked at the dog run, decided that was an eye sore and we need todismantle it. Jane grabbed a plier and started to work, I helped to haul the fence into the garage – we want to keep the wired fence, the Buffhams one time told us that can be expensive if we want to buy one.
Then we moved the dog house to the shed, right after we took the dog house down, there was a mouse came out of the dog house! Both Joe and Jane tried to hit it using their broom, it run back to the dog house and was hidden inside, Joe poked dog house, it came out again! They hit it again! Adrenaline was pumped up while hunting the mouse, all of us became very excited!
But we never caught that little mouse. We let this pass us and totally forgot about it. That was a couple months ago.
Last week, one morning, I was hurriedly packing my usual breakfast bagel and send Joe to the bus. When I opened the drawer that with our plastic bags in it, I saw there were a lot plastic bag pieces all over the place in the drawer. It looked very suspicious. I feel disgusted and didn’t want to think about what caused it. So I had Joe to look at it again. We both agreed that was mouse chewing on the plastic bag! I reused the plastic bag for a couple times because I don’t think bagel is dirty and I always try to live frugally and conserve the resource. It must have had sesame seeds in it that fell from the bagel and mice decided to clean it up for us. We saw mouse waste in drawer too.
I all of the sudden feel very nauseate and didn’t want to touch anything in kitchen. I didn’t want to share my kitchen with mice! I don’t want to eat the leftovers from mice, I don’t want to use anything that mice touched. I am depressed to even think about what mice did when they were in my kitchen drawers, … I need to stop my imagination on the details, it really didn’t help me on recovering my normalcy of staying in this house. Till more damage was discovered, we threw all our kitchen utensils in a pot and start to boil them…
We went to Home Depot immediately. For someone who never had such a problem before, we didn’t even know where to start from. The sales attendant was very helpful, it is the season, and he sounded like we were the 100th people who asked the same question to him. It is a common problem – to our amazement. We followed him to the “mice” aisle.
Our option is to capture them, or just kill them on the spot, or poison them. We took one kind from each category, the box that would trap the mouse, the little reflect tool with the cheese bait that would kill the hungry mouse on the spot, and the greenish poison mouse food. Armed with all these mouse weapons, we went home and deployed them on each corner of our house, felt much better.
First day, we were eagerly checking our drawers right after coming back, nothing. We open the closet under the sink, Joe said he saw something, there is one stuck on the sticky board – still alive! (captivation category). Then we went to basement, there were two were dead on the gadgets! ( the killing category.) Jane announced that half of our mouse poison food was gone in garage. ( the poison category.) They all seemed to work!
Second day, another 3 dead mouse.
Third day, none, but garage’s drug were totally gone.
Fourth day, none, nothing happened.
We bought more gadgets. We start to abandon the poison food, what happened to the mouse that ate the poison food? We never know. Maybe that’s why our garage sink started to be clogged? We started to realize that these poison foods are not environmental friendly, we felt guilty that we didn’t realized this before. A fox could die when they eat the dead mouse, ( we are not sure if fox would eat them or not, but whatever eat the mouse would be poisoned too.). We don’t think the stores should be selling these mouse drugs, and they shouldn’t be made in the first place. We stopped using the glue too – why do we do with a captured live mouse? Joe doesn’t want to deal with it; none of us wants to kill them in person. We would rather to see a dead mouse and not think of how it got killed in the first place.
Till this day, we have never had mouse problem again.
