Rural Life With a mouse Always Keeps it Interesting

Rural life with a mouse always keeps it interesting. Everyone has their mouse catching stories, from humor to sheer yuck! So my sister — unable to have an indoor cat to do mouse patrol because she’s extremely allergic — has tried various methods with extreme results. In her last home, someone in the neighborhood had used rodent poison and she ended up with one dead mouse decaying in a wall with a horrible smell. Not sure which wall, it became a hit and miss to locate and eradicate the corpse. Kind of like whack-a-mole.

Presently, she’s preoccupied listening to the mouse, not only exploring her closet but also the drawers of her nightstand right next to her head as she lays trying to sleep. Oh, ick. She was totally freaking her out when she woke my brother-in -law ( at 1:30 am), demanding that he set several regular mouse traps with cheese or peanut butter in her closet and behind her nightstand. He’s dealing with some very clever mice as they eat the treats without activating the traps. Still driving my sister crazy!  To be fair, he’s caught 4 to date in various places. But she’s also added the super sticky pads to surround the trap in the closet, thinking they’ll be successful outsmarting these clever mice she hears at night, but so far no dice no mice!!  Until . . ..

The last few days she’s had a horrible migraine and just feeling funky like she has the flu. Just going about farm life in Sacramento. While housecleaning, she discovered a foul smell in the bedroom, but couldn’t locate it. Until today!! She got down on hands and knees to look under her nightstand. In a very confined space, clear back past the area rug up and against the wall, she spied some big dark thing.

She grabs her trusted flashlight and realizes my brother-in-law had put a super sticky mouse pad back there without her knowledge and, yes, there was the busy-body mouse!  Dead as can be, stuck in the pad as well as ending life tangled in her lamp cord! This is a true story. So now she gets the face mask, gloves, Clorox cleaning towelettes, Lysol, sprays her whole arsenal to erase signs of this pesky rodent. A stinky dirty job for sure, not to mention it had begun chewing through her lamp cord trying to free himself, explaining why her light had been flickering. Yes, obviously her husband caught an ear banging when he got home for not sharing where he had placed this particular sticky pad. LOL!! 

Most of us, especially out in the country, have a very capable barn cat or two to keep the rodent population down.  But for y’all unable to have a cat for one reason or another, you can really see the importance of formulating a plan and deciding which method of elimination (traps) you’re gonna use to be prepared for your own mouse trickery. Rural life with a mouse always keeps it interesting. But if there’s more than one unwelcome resident in your home you might just want to share the location of said traps, or I may be reading your crazy mouse story in your own blog.

If you would like to sell or buy a home, please call Weintraub & Wallace Realtors with RE/MAX Gold. We can be reached at 916-223-6759.

— JaCi Wallace