Possumblog

I found a mumified possum in the hay barn yesterday.

But in answer to your mice problem, fergit the traps. You need a cat, and I am just the man to fix you up with one... or twelve. How many do you want?

I tell you what--between you and Jim Smith, I'd be the most cat-wealthy man in the world. In any event, at this time I'd like to request a total of zero cats, with a like number to be sent at a later date.

We've only had a couple of mice in our house here. Justin takes great delight in using an old fashioned trap and notching it after each kill.

My parents house was a veritible mouse haven (also a squirrel and bat haven) especially on my floor -- I had the third floor to myself as a teenager. I used to be terrified of the little things and still don't like them, but after one made a nest in my dresser and died, and another dragged off an entire Hershey's bar in the middle of the night and another died in the middle of the hallway while I was taking a bath, I got better about not screaming and disposing of the creatures. I left the other critters to my father and brothers though.

I like the old-fashioned traps, too, and have a couple out. They do have a couple of drawbacks in that they can make a big mess with splattering mouse guts, and they can only catch one at a time. The glue traps can catch multiple mousies on one sticky pad, and they don't explode.

There is a very cute book with the same name.

They are very tricky in the story.

Oh, don't get me started on SNAKES in the house! Reba doesn't mind going through the garage with mice in there, but snakes would be RIGHT out.

Anyway, if the snake in the story was REALLY smart, he'd use sticky glue traps instead of a jar to put the tender, juicy mouses in.

Umm, Jordana? What's with the Hershey bars being up on the third floor in the first place, hmmm?

And I had a mouse infestation in my first apartment. Sick, twisted bizarre joy came from getting up at four AM and using a broom on one little squeaker caught in a glue trap to get him to shut up. I imagine from the outside it seemed insane - a half-awake grad student whacking a mouse with a broom, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Roommates can be so inconsiderate.

Well, you could have also done some research since you were already awake, and see how far a mouse on a glue trap could be flung from an apartment window by a half-asleep grad student.

Even better would have been to have experimented with using the broom as a sort of atlatl...

Perhaps I could check with the esteemed Dr. P. on that science experiment. There were two atmospheric issues with the apartment that would affect the study design.

1) It was a first floor apartment. Gravitational fluctuations at that low level would need to be considered.

2) I had burglar bars installed. I'd have wanted assurances that the flinging would have resulted in succesful EVO rather than an unseemly recoil effect. Probable results of the latter would have been grad student + mouse + glue trap stuck to head * decibel level of shriek / hits to the head with broom.

A predictable, if not desired result.

Hmmm--that sounds like an nearly insurmountable set of obstacles. One might have to settle for seeing if it could be flipped through the bars far enough from the building so that the squeekiness would be inaudible.

Then again, the whole self-whacking with the broom does sound much more entertaining. Especially if the police are then summoned. And PETA.

Dan, I was a lazy high school student who had bought a tasty chocolate snack and then left it and various other detritus from my backpack scattered around my bedroom on the floor. As you might imagine, I didn't leave food around my room after that.

I did learn from my years in mouseland that they don't just like eating food stuffs, but they are also quite fond of nibbling Ivory soap bars.

Well, it is 99 and 44/100ths pure.

Though, to my mind, that's really only 99 and 11/25ths, but I guess that's why I'm not in marketing. Plus I still have some self-esteem left.

I just wonder what sort of impurities there are in that other .66%.

It might interest you to know that it's actually .666% impure. Not sure if that means anything, but the devil is in the details.

Well, I might believe there could be something to it since it IS made by Proctor and Gamble...