Forty-five minutes ago, Raj came home and found me jumping up and down on the couch on my tiptoes, making high-pitched noises of distress while peering furiously across the room into the kitchen area of our apartment. A minute before that, I had innocently gone to throw a piece of paper away into our kitchen trash can.Can you imagine my horror when I opened the cupboard door and saw the tail-end of a rodent racing back into the darkness along the edge of the trash can? A rodent. A fairly big rodent. 8 inches away from my me! Ewwwhh!!
Completely grossed out (me, not him), we went immediately to Duane Reade (New York's drug stores) and purchased a mouse-busting arsenal. We came back to the house armed with 4 traditional mouse traps and 2 sticky pads. I prefer the traditional mouse traps as (I believe) they kill the mouse quicker, and are thus less painful and less cruel. The sticky pads, which are supposed to trap the mouse while it's running by seem more inhumane. Plus, what do you do with a live mouse trapped on one of the sticky pads? I don't think I could pick it up. I can hardly pick up the mouse traps with the dead mice on them.
Of course, all the traps are cruel. There's no getting around it. However, there's also no getting around the fact that I absolutely can not live with a mouse - or god forbid a rat! And, this being New York, it could very well be a rat. I see them all the time crawling around the tracks of the subway. I'm sorry, but my love of animals does not extend to sharing my home with rodents or roaches.
After we came back from the store, Raj cleaned out the cupboards and I started setting up the mouse traps, baiting each trap with a dollop of Skippy peanut butter. I'm usually quite good at setting traps. However, this time, my attention wavered for a millisecond and the very first trap snapped shut on my thumb. If you have never snapped a mousetrap on your fingers, please take this advice: avoid it. The trap snapped down on the knuckle of my left thumb, which is now a faintly greenish blue. Ouch.
The pain only made me more determined to get the mouse. I announced to the mouse my intention to kill it - on the chance that this mouse is of the Mrs. Frisby variety, I wanted to give it fair warning to clear out before meeting an untimely death - and then placed the traps.
I'm sorry Mouse.
7 comments:
EEeewwwwww!
Tracy, I know, it's soooooo disgusting. I'm sure in CA you never even have the possibility of mice, but remember I'm in NY! I live in a building with 8 other apartments near a subway station. It's not my fault, I swear!!!!
Trust me, Buttercup...I understand! About a year and a half ago, I woke up to what I thought was my dog (interestingly, I didn't own a dog at the time...I was just in deep sleep) sniffing in my ear. Then the "dog" made a very odd sound, kind of like a whirring noise. I bolted upright in bed and jumped out of it, only to look back at a mouse staring at me and looking a little bewildered. My roommate (who owned the house we lived in) called someone out to the house who did a little investigating and informed us that the mouse was more likely a rat. Eeewww, indeed!
Thankfully, my little visitor didn't return.
Find anything in your traps this morning?
Tracy - HOLY CRAP. If that were to happen to me, I think I would die. It would be the end. No more worrying about the future. Done.
Nothing was in the traps this morning.
We had mice when I lived up in the DC area. NOT FUN. I mean, they're cute and all (in the sense that clean mice in pet stores are cute), but ew! No. No, no, no. We ended up getting those little poison pellets. Sorry mice, but you gotta go!
Even PETA people must take a stand agains mice in their home, don't you think?
When they plowed up the field one house down from ours, we got mice. I was still living at home, and my mom made me get rid of the mouse-bodies and reset the traps. But much better than having mousies running around your house.
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