Mice is a Four-Letter Word

Susan over at e-i-e-i-omg! just posted about her vehicle / mouse problems.  “Lucky” for her, it turned out to have a somewhat happy ending (if you consider forking over $75 for the removal of a tiny rodent from your station wagon good fortune).

Since she was brave enough to share with us all the fact that she had a rodent setting up housekeeping in her vehicle, I figured I could copy her idea (and relieve me from the task of trying to think of a blog post for the day).

I hate mice - no wait - I loathe mice.  I think just about everyone has the same feelings.

Although I didn’t always hate the furry, beady-eyed creatures.  I recall one instance in my youth that we had a mouse in the pantry.  My Dad got one of those new sticky-traps (they were new back then) and put it in the cupboard.  When I opened the door to get my morning Lucky Charms, I saw the cute little creature stuck to the sticky board; and it was still alive.  Looking at me with those little black eyes.  Twitching his little pink nose.  Trying in vain to wrench himself from the evil stickiness.  We did this.  We put this mouse-torturing device in our house and now he was doomed.

So I did what any other little animal-loving city girl would do.  I picked the sticky board up and tried to feed the mouse.  Tried to give it water out of a spoon.  Tried to peel its little rodent body off the sticky board.  All, of course, to no avail.  Not exactly sure what happened to him, although I’m assuming my Dad found out what I was doing and put an end to it.

Fast forward twenty (or so) years. 

Most of the words I utter when finding a mouse around our house consist of only four letters.  I am constantly battling the mice in the barn.  I’ve tried to coax a feral cat to take up residence in the barn, but no luck.  I try to make sure I sweep the barn floors of the spilled goat food, but it just ends up right outside the barn anyhow.  I’ve been trying to keep mouse-house-building-stuff out of the barn, but they always seem to pull something into the barn to nest in.   The sticky traps don’t work very well in the barn.  Not sure why.  One trap that does work is the water-filled-bucket kind’a trap.  (Remind me to post a picture of that soon).  But for some reason we haven’t had it in the barn for over a year.  (And remind me to put it back in the barn.)

When I do manage to do a good cleaning out of the goat barn, I usually end up squashing a half dozen or more little mice and tossing them to the chickens.  Chickens just love eating mice.  Weird, hugh? 

About two weeks ago, I was driving into town and turned the A/C on.  And heard a horrible thump-thump-thump-WACK noise coming from the air vents.  So I quickly turned the air off.  Waited several minutes and tried again.  Thump-thump-thump-whirrrrrrrr…..then nothing.  Just cool air conditioning.  Unfortunately, I knew exactly what was happening as the same thing occurred a few years ago.  But, even more unfortunate was the fact that after Paul pulled the dashboard apart this time to get to the blower and squirrel cage fan thingy (funny how they call it squirrel cage, hugh?), he did NOT find the mouse in the fan and couldn’t really tear much more of the dashboard apart without compromising the air bag.

So, can you guess what my car smells like?  Let me remind you that it’s been in the upper 90’s and humid for the past several weeks.  My original theory was that I would park the car in a sunny spot with the windows rolled up for a few days and cook the critter to a crispy, non-stinky corpse and we’d just live with the fact that we had a mouse-mummy lodged somewhere in the ventilation system of the vehicle.

Well, it didn’t work.  The smell has subsided (or I’m just getting used to it).  I’ve also put an air freshener in the car, but it still doesn’t smell very nice.  I wonder if they have one of those pine tree shaped air fresheners that have “anti-rotting-rodent” smell?

In the meantime, my car smells like Coconut a’la Decomposing-Rodent.

Think I can market that fragrance combo to Yankee Candle?

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