Saturday, September 6, 2014

Goodbye my little friend!




This morning I woke up with a vengeance!
 
There’s blood out there and it will be MINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  (evil laugh here)
There are mice in our walls.

 It’s no surprise really.  I mean, we bought an 1890’s farmhouse in rural SE Colorado and it backs up to Mighty Mouse’s Golden Corral buffet, a farmer’s beautiful almost harvest ready corn field.  Well, DUHHHHHH you say to me about mice in our walls.  “You silly city girl, you,” you utter under your breath at me.  It’s OK, really.

Adding insult to injury I noticed the FIRST evidence of this yesterday as I was cleaning Mr. Lazy and Mr. Belligerent’s litter boxes.  Those two useless felines are actually allowing the mice to use their elimination facility.  Yes, there were mouse droppings in the box!  Oh, no, don’t mind me; I don’t mind cleaning up the box while you two furry beasts lie around sanctimoniously licking your rear ends.

Now, being as this is the first pest out here in the wilds of Bent County that I can’t fill full of lead, however, don’t think I don’t want to.  I need a solution and I need one fast.  Who knows what Mickey and his free-loading mouse buddies are doing to the interior of my walls.  I heard that frat party they were hosting last night.  I think it was any-coin-buys-an-electrical-wire blow out par-tay!  The holier-than-thou cats were ignoring this.  What?  What noise in the wall?  We only hear the clank of the food being poured into the bowl.  That’s what happens when you start allowing the “Medicinal Catnip” to be freely dispensed; the crumbling of a productive, hunting feline society.

I think I understand Bill Murray’s character in Caddy Shack with the gopher issue.   
It started to drive him crazy.  When I Google searched this information, I started to lose my marbles too with fret:
The gestation period is about 19–21 days, and they give birth to a litter of 3–14 young (average six to eight). One female can have 5 to 10 litters per year, so the mouse population can increase very quickly.
Holy crap!

Let’s all do our old-school, NON-Common Core math for a second.  Let’s assume Miss Mouse is having about 11 babies per birthing event.  Hmmm 11x, let’s just all it about 8 litters per year.  Ok, so 11x8=88 in a year’s time.  Let’s assume that half of those are females who get bred soon thereafter.  44x88=3,872
That is more than the entire population of Las Animas in a year’s time, in the walls of our home.  I am moving to militant mouse removal strategies.  

I’ve called upon my like-minded FB friends in rural areas and so far have learned that peppermint oil soaked cotton balls will work to chase them away.  I’ve learned from many on line videos from Bob Villa, the original OLD house guy, that I need to seal cracks around the house and hang plastic owls in the trees along with a ribbon like material that looks like a snake to a mouse.  Yes, prevention is good.  I’m concerned about the ones who are already IN the house.  

 I expressed my worry to the cats.  They’re indifferent to my concerns. 
See?  Do you see any interest in anything other than a nap?

I’m thinking I should go and busy myself with something else because my energy to capture the enemy is consuming me and only makes me want to watch Caddy Shack again.
Here’s the famous dynamite clip that I cannot do in my rodent irradiation as much as I’d like to.  Carry on!
~Anne Boswell Taylor
#MouseHasToDie
 






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