the rix mix

My pre-WWII apartment building, in a working class neighborhood, has roaches, ants & mice. The ants are a very tiny variety that according to pest control websites feeds on dead roaches. The landlord makes half-assed attempts at control with an indifferent exterminator, but even if he had a competent company the building is of an age that makes it "incurable." I don't see many of these vermin anymore. Long ago I taped up a lot of cracks & openings, spread around boric acid. I use spraycan poison only occasionally around the bathroom sink & behind the fridge. I use roach "motels" not as control but to ascertain how well my efforts are working. Roaches can go weeks without food but only a few days without water so dry sinks & no dripping taps are the rule. I keep the kitchen area crumb free (but for unavoidable coffee grounds, which bugs seem not to like), no unsealed food containers or edible garbage in bags, which is just common sense housekeeping. So the only attractive area is around the computer, where I tend to snack. My strategy is to force vermin to seek out other apartments, the ones with damp bathrooms, dirty ovens, children, open garbage cans & sloppy cooks.

I'm not bothered that mice & voles move invisibly all around me in the outside world, but indoors they freak me out. I don't know one is here unless I see it, hear it, or find it stuck to a glue trap. Fortunately, they have been very infrequent visitors (knock on wood). Yesterday I heard a mouse scratching behind my makeshift CD shelves, so I moved enough stuff around there to be sure it had run, probably to the radiator by a front window - the place they seem to enter from no matter what I tape up. Now I was on guard. Later, while here at the PC, a movement caught my eye - it was a little dark gray mouse advancing cautiously across open floor between radiator & me. If I had a cat, the mouse would have had only seconds to live at that point. I chased the mouse back under the radiator, noticed another possible floor crack entry & taped that up, Then I arranged glue traps around the radiator in an unpredictable (to a mouse) way. I don't use baited live or snap traps because I want the mice to stay away, not be attracted.

At four a.m. (an active mouse hour), as I was about to shut down the PC, I heard - over the Russian classical music in my headphones - the telltale squeak a mouse makes when it is hopelessly stuck. It was the little gray mouse - lucky for it & for me, since they are doomed by their struggle if mired for more than an hour or two. I put on my sneakers, got a small bottle of vegetable oil, picked up the trap, carried it & the mouse outside & up the street a few yards, drenched the critter in oil & shook the trap until it fell/slid into a pile of leaves. Of the six mice I've trapped over the past year, three got out alive. & when I catch one, there's another soon to follow, & then hopefully there's none for while.

Telling others about this, the yuck & eeeeuuwww reactions come from apt dwellers & antiseptic suburbanites. People living near parks, fields & woods have to fight mice, ants, chipmunks, squirrels, hornets, wasps, & other critters year round according to season, & most of these folks take a dead or alive preferably dead attitude. In their wars, the second thoughts of human sentiment are as useful as Gen. George Patton worrying about German soldiers having clean socks.