In thinking about the number
11, I was also reminded of this scene from Spinal Tap:
If 10 represents the pinnacle of achievement, 11 is even
better, right?
When I started writing this post a couple of days ago, 11
was the number of mice that we had caught in our house since October. This
number is already obsolete however, as we have caught that many again and
more. (We could be having an
interesting discussion about the smallest odd prime number that is not a twin
prime.) This is very disturbing. We’ve had mouse trouble before—one here, one
there—but never have we had an epidemic like this. We’ve tried all kinds of
traps to great (ugh) success—traditional traps, glue traps, sticky gel traps
with bait, sticky gel traps without bait, snap traps. Our bait of choice for
the traditional traps and snap traps is peanut butter. Often the mice have
eaten the peanut butter without springing the trap, but we just patiently
spread some more on there, confident that they’ll be back. Once, we even caught
two mice in one trap. That was kind of exciting. What hasn’t been exciting is
hearing the mice climbing (and falling) inside our walls and scurrying across
our kitchen ceiling. What hasn’t been exciting is catching the occasional live
mouse and dumping it, with the trap, in a bucket of water to drown it (or finding
one in the kitchen trash and whacking it to death). What hasn’t been exciting
is removing everything from under the kitchen sink and drawers, cleaning out
the little mouse droppings, washing everything thoroughly before putting it all
back—and having to do it again two days later. What hasn’t been exciting is
observing (with mounting anxiety) the mouse smell getting stronger, to the
point where my eyes began to burn from the off-gassing of the mouse feces and urine.
Okay, this is getting serious.
We racked our brains to try to think of any changes that
recently took place that could have contributed to the increased infestation.
We knew they were probably coming into the kitchen from behind the dishwasher,
so tonight we pulled that out—the burning eyes was a good indication that, yes,
they were definitely coming in through here. Some online resources suggested
plugging any holes that were at least ¼” in diameter, or even smaller (are you
serious?), with steel wool and sealing it with caulk. This is what I did. However,
this didn’t solve the issue of how they are getting into the house.
We had some work done on our house this past fall as part of
an income-based weatherization program through a local organization named Hope
Community Builders. One of the things they did was remove the door of our
attached garage, frame in and insulate the space and add a set of french doors.
Because the garage is below grade, the workers added a drain in front of the
new doors to keep water from entering and tied it in to a drain coming from the
garage. Our guess is that the mice are finding their way into the garage
through this drain, which then gives them access to the basement and the rest
of the house. We now have an 8x8x12 piece of lumber sitting on top of a can of
paint that is resting on top of the garage drain cover, blocking the (¼”) holes
in the top.
