We don’t have mice! Just rats. The two critters we caught in the traps last night, which I thought were big mice, were actually baby rats. Thank goodness, only one kind of vermin.
Moving on to something less depressing, I liked this post by internet movie pioneer Earl Newton of Stranger Things, on “Dealing with Silence and Rejection.” Having just received another rejection slip (my most encouraging yet!), this was a good find. Thanks to Mur Lafferty for retweeting it.
Only we would discover that our happy home has been invaded by both rats and mice at the same time! It’s like a Batman movie — every live-action Batman movie after the first Michael Keaton movie in 1989 has had two villains, because one psychotic bad guy endangering the city just wouldn’t be awful enough. So we have rats in the crawlspace and mice sneaking into the pantry. I’m surprised they can co-exist like that; I would have expected some kind of rodent gang turf war.
The Siren ended up throwing out a lot of food, and I had to deal with a mouse caught on one of the glue traps the exterminator put out, which I hate doing. The house I shared in law school had a mouse problem at the start of my third year; we started with glue traps, but after we caught the first dozen, we moved on to poison. Today, our exterminator put out both.
There’s a restaurant up the street, and the exterminator’s best guess was that the rats are attracted by their garbage; he thinks with all the bushes and ground cover we and our neighbors have, the backyards are like (shudder) a rat highway, and a few just gnawed their way into our crawlspace. I don’t even begin to know how to process that. We’ve never seen any rats or mice outside, just the occasional rabbit.
On a lighter note, after the kids and I watched this video a dozen times before they went to bed, I’m considering growing a mustache.
The Unfocused Life 