Of Mice and Other Assorted Pests

Mice

I am unphased by most things, including cleaning disgusting hair and black slime out of bathroom drains, dissecting cadavers, and cleaning up assorted bodily fluids. But my nemesis is mice. They just totally creep me out. 

A few weeks ago I smelled a distinctly unpleasant odor in our big walk in pantry. We all smelled it, but I kept reassuring everyone that it must be a rotting potato somewhere. So on a Saturday morning I started pulling out and organizing the pantry, all the while sniffing in nice and deep to try to find the source of the odor. At the very back of the pantry I reached down to the floor to pick up a box of cereal and I SAW IT.  A box mousetrap, which had been forgotten in the back of the pantry since our last mouse infestation years ago was occupied with one rotting mouse and one trapped live mouse!  My scream spanned four octaves and woke Dan from a sound sleep. I was speechless and traumatized for at least 10 minutes.

Dan extricated the trap and helped me remove everything from the pantry so we could bleach water everything the vermin might have touched.  Well, he actually bleach watered everything because I was still moaning and shallow breathing in the other room.  We set more traps under the kitchen sink and cupboards because we saw evidence of mouse poop there too.  Seriously. There is no redeeming value to a creature that poops as it walks. 

A few days later I opened the cupboard under the bar to pull out the slow cooker for dinner and I saw a splayed, bloody mouse in one of our traps. I screamed and writhed on the floor for half an hour before I came to terms with the fact that I really did need the slow cooker out of the cupboard. It took everything I have in me to open the cupboard and pull it out, with my eyes mostly closed and my nose plugged.  Yuck. Dan found one more disgusting surprise under the kitchen sink, and since then we seem to be rodent free. I make Joseph check the traps every day because he is way braver than me.

Spiders

Spiders are not as bad as mice, but they have been plentiful in our house lately too. In addition to the normal brown house spiders we see now and then, twice we have seen a spider that was seriously as big as a hand.  Luckily, Dan was home so I didn't have to test my spider-killing superpowers.

Ants and Fruit Flies

Combatting ants and fruit flies is definitely more in my comfort zone, but this late summer/early fall has been a doozy for both. 

Little sugar ants have been scurrying all around our candy cupboard (yes we have one) and the cupboard with sugar, honey, etc.  I've have had the exterminators spray twice, but I'm leery of adding more chemicals to our kitchen. I have to admit that I did put some ant bait down last week hoping the ants would eat it, take it back to their nests, and die painful deaths. Sure enough, the ants swarmed all over the bait and licked the cardboard clean, but they must be immune to ant bait because they digested the poison and then continued to crawl all over my cupboards. I have resorted to vacuuming them up umpteen times a day. Not terribly effective, but it's non toxic and it feels good. 

We are trying to eat lots of fresh fruits and veggies and a few fruit flies are the inevitable result this time of year. But this year we are being overtaken by a veritable army of fruit flies. My many vinegar traps are killing hundreds a day, but the fruit flies are reproducing at a much higher rate, so I have been resorting to the vacuum trick again. I do not have the patience to wait for the fruit flies to decide to land into the cup of vinegar so I've kept my vacuum handy and every time I see that flies have landed in a swarm I gleefully suck them up.  Ha ha ha - their tiny little bodies are no match for my super powered central vacuum.  

(I think that the rodent/insect battle of 2014 might be threatening my sanity a little).