Three. Dead. Mice.
That is enough to trigger a myocardial infarction. Add to that “your very own kitchen” and you will be guaranteed a stroke to boot.
Welcome to our nightmare.
Last week, Tarun saw a little thing scurry into a kitchen cupboard. He stopped in his tracks and screamed for me. He said it was a mouse or maybe a squirrel or a lizard.
All I heard was HANTAVIRUS.
I don’t freeze easily. I’m the girl you call to deal with bees, hornets and snakes but mouse is way beyond my pay grade. When Tarun called for me, my instinct was to stand on a chair with my fists at my chin until the exterminators came.
Instead, I shut the cupboard door tightly and ran out to the nearest grocery store. I returned 15 minutes later with every mousetrap they had. Like a dozen of them. We laid three traps hoping to lure the little stinker and retreated upstairs. Needless to say, our night was dominated by nightmares of monstrous alien mice taking over our home. In the morning, I ventured downstairs with palpitations I could hear in my head and immediately saw a mouse on the sticky trap at the end of the foyer.
Yes! Yes! YES!!
I went into the kitchen the other way and WHOA! There was a second one at the other end of the kitchen and then a third one near the dishwasher. Three traps, three mice!! Death would have been easier.
Breaking news: Cartoon renditions are fake news; they are anything but cute.
After letting out an ultrasonic scream that probably made the tides move, I ran upstairs to Tarun. The next hour was spent hyperventilating! The local pest control guy came in the late morning and did extensive reconnaissance. He gave us the likely root causes. A mesh on a crawl space vent was torn and a HVAC pipe had gaps around it. Plus, an unused kitchen vent did not have a mesh. These make for great entryways for mice.
Repairs to the breaches in our fort are underway and many black boxes have been placed outside and inside the house to lure errant critters if they make it past the openings. Turns out the pandemic has robbed rodents of their food supply. With less garbage from restaurants, they have become very aggressive in search of food.
Whodathunk coronavirus had another salvo to deliver?!
If you haven’t checked those crawl space vents, please do so or else I just might leave a trail of crumbs directing our critters to your home. In the meantime, I am Lysoling every bit of the house and will surface in a couple of years.
