A Mouse in the House

One of the downsides of living in an old property like ours is that it's fairly common for mice to take up residence from time to time. There are plenty of holes in the floorboards and gaps here and there, and it's not a problem for them to find a way in.

I'd encountered mice in previous flats. When I lived in town, the first place I lived in when I moved to Edinburgh, we had at least one. Strangely, when I moved to the cottage in Penicuik, behind Brandon's house, it was never a problem, though there were plenty of spiders. It was a relatively new building though, not sure if that makes a huge difference.

Luckily we hadn't encountered any in our new home until fairly recently. Laura saw what she described as 'a small leaf blowing across the floor' out of the corner of her eye, which ended up underneath the washing machine. We later realised that in all probability this was actually a mouse. That was quite a few months ago we (actually Laura) had only seen it once.

Well, that has changed. The other night I heard Laura shrieking from the kitchen. The kind of shriek that said 'there's a mouse'. (Laura informs me that she didn't 'shriek'...but there was a startled noise at any rate.) It had ran out of the larder and over her foot, so it was understandable. I would have been a bit startled myself. Since then we've found fresh droppings on a daily basis and I've seen it a couple of times myself (the first time whilst standing on a chair with an empty bucket in my hand in a vein attempt to 'trap it' as it scurried out of the larder. Think of the large black lady from Tom and Jerry. Not a pretty sight.)

To say that the timing sucks for something like this to happen is an understatement. Laura's cat Gweno passed away a few months ago so our resident 'mouser' is no longer with us. And we're about to bring a new born baby into the flat. The last thing we want is some nasty, dirty friggin' rodent shitting and pissing all over the place and crawling over our food.

So we've begun a 4-stage rodent assault strategy.

Step one: Traps
We put down traps baited with chocolate and peanut butter around where we'd seen it. These, however tempting, have been duly ignored.

Step 2: Sonic assault
Laura ordered some 'plug in' devices which emit a high pitched noise which is inaudible to human ears yet apparently disturbs the mice so they won't nest. They arrived this morning (a pack of four) and are now plugged in.

Step 3: Poison
We'd rather not resort to this option as they could eat the poison and then go away and die, who knows where. Not a very nice way to go either. As you know, two of my pets were rodents, a hamster and a squirrel. So, as much as I want the mouse out of here, I'd rather it died quickly and painlessly, like a lethal snap to the neck.

Step 4: Cat
This isn't a great time to be getting a new pet, so I doubt this is a realistic option at the moment. Ideally if we could 'borrow' a friend's cat for a week or so then that would be great. Unfortunately, there aren't any strong contenders we can think of right now.

We thought the little shit was happy in the kitchen larder, but last night we found it in the living room behind the Xmas tree! I pulled back the sofa and found a trail of droppings along the wall. I'm just waiting for it to get into bed with us.