Welcome back, and a story.
No idea if I'll stay, or if this is a brief vacation until I can deal with the rest of the world again. All other posts here will be friends-only because I'm kind of a private guy.
Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter are the social media equivalent of the bustle of the big city. Lots of loud noises, people ranting on street corners. With the appalling disaster of the election and other atrocities, being constantly bombarded has made me... tired.
No, it's made me prone to anxiety attacks. I need to go somewhere quieter where I can share my thoughts and not stress quite so much that I'm going to peek out into the street and see a fusillade of artillery strikes or the end of the world.
So here I am.
We've been hearing scratching in the walls this fall and into the winter. It's been getting worse, in the corner of the kitchen nearest the heater and the bonus room.
However, we didn't really make the connection for the location until I was out this morning hunting matzo meal for soup. I went hunting and failing to find boxes of meal, until I got to the bottom right bin in our shelving in the laundry/pantry. The bin full of chocolate, flour, and other baking comestibles had flour scattered about, and brown crap... uh, wait, literally. And oh hey, that's a mouse moving about in there!
I panicked, but not so badly that I didn't find a lid and stack it on the guy.
I have a problem dealing with mammalian pest critters. It's harder to treat their lives as trivial when they're so close genetically.
Just means I felt guilty when we ruled the box of food totalled and I binned the whole thing, entombing the mouse.
Story's not over, though. We wondered if we'd turn up more mice, or if that guy was solo. It'd been long enough we'd been hearing scratching that I didn't really expect solo, but I could hope. I sealed up all the food in there with plastic lids (they were all in plastic bins, but we'd unlidded them for convenience last year sometime)
Nope. Late in the day I wandered out to put away soup in the freezer and I watched not one, not two, but 3 mice scamper across our shelving into the back corner where a variety of bags and boxes have been holding down the floor since we moved in.
Knowing where the lot of them were nesting didn't help me relax. Knowing there was a _they_ didn't help me relax.
So fine, I moved all the things I could easily visually check for mice to more secure locations, found plastic bins and secured the things I couldn't easily check in those, and eventually scared the remaining rodents out of the corner. Seeing them all scrabble for cover startled my fight reflex, which just felt odd.
They ran around the outside of the room, and I spotted one of them bolting into a small gap in the sheetrock on the floor. (another got into the garage, which was... frustrating.)
I filled the gap with tinfoil, which I had on hand, and told the remaining mouse that I spotted it was up to him to get out safe.
The story's obviously still not over. I'm still feeling icky about the whole deal.
Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter are the social media equivalent of the bustle of the big city. Lots of loud noises, people ranting on street corners. With the appalling disaster of the election and other atrocities, being constantly bombarded has made me... tired.
No, it's made me prone to anxiety attacks. I need to go somewhere quieter where I can share my thoughts and not stress quite so much that I'm going to peek out into the street and see a fusillade of artillery strikes or the end of the world.
So here I am.
We've been hearing scratching in the walls this fall and into the winter. It's been getting worse, in the corner of the kitchen nearest the heater and the bonus room.
However, we didn't really make the connection for the location until I was out this morning hunting matzo meal for soup. I went hunting and failing to find boxes of meal, until I got to the bottom right bin in our shelving in the laundry/pantry. The bin full of chocolate, flour, and other baking comestibles had flour scattered about, and brown crap... uh, wait, literally. And oh hey, that's a mouse moving about in there!
I panicked, but not so badly that I didn't find a lid and stack it on the guy.
I have a problem dealing with mammalian pest critters. It's harder to treat their lives as trivial when they're so close genetically.
Just means I felt guilty when we ruled the box of food totalled and I binned the whole thing, entombing the mouse.
Story's not over, though. We wondered if we'd turn up more mice, or if that guy was solo. It'd been long enough we'd been hearing scratching that I didn't really expect solo, but I could hope. I sealed up all the food in there with plastic lids (they were all in plastic bins, but we'd unlidded them for convenience last year sometime)
Nope. Late in the day I wandered out to put away soup in the freezer and I watched not one, not two, but 3 mice scamper across our shelving into the back corner where a variety of bags and boxes have been holding down the floor since we moved in.
Knowing where the lot of them were nesting didn't help me relax. Knowing there was a _they_ didn't help me relax.
So fine, I moved all the things I could easily visually check for mice to more secure locations, found plastic bins and secured the things I couldn't easily check in those, and eventually scared the remaining rodents out of the corner. Seeing them all scrabble for cover startled my fight reflex, which just felt odd.
They ran around the outside of the room, and I spotted one of them bolting into a small gap in the sheetrock on the floor. (another got into the garage, which was... frustrating.)
I filled the gap with tinfoil, which I had on hand, and told the remaining mouse that I spotted it was up to him to get out safe.
The story's obviously still not over. I'm still feeling icky about the whole deal.