Pest Control

Melanie left Tuesday morning for a three-day backpacking trip with two other women.  Monday evening I went to the garage to try to find one of my lightweight sleeping pads for her to take.  I reached into a box of camping gear — and got showered with dry mouse turds.  We’d been having a little problem with mice in the kitchen.  Clearly the four mice I’ve caught lately were foraging from their home base in the garage.

I didn’t tell Melanie about my mouse turd shower.  We had to move away from our old house on Kings Grade Road because of her prejudices toward mice. I’d like to not move right now. So I waited for her to leave Tuesday morning, then got the boys up and put them to work.  We pulled everything out of the garage that wasn’t on a shelf — and then when we found mice droppings on some of the shelves, we pulled that stuff out, too, including those shelves. I’ve swept the garage, went to the dump with a bunch of stuff, threw away other stuff, recycled boxes of mouse-dropped paper back books, taken four garbage bags of pop cans to Fred Meyer, loaded the car with a bed frame and some other stuff for Habitat’s Re-Store — and tried to figure out how to organize what’s left so we can keep the garage cleaner and less mouse-friendly.  There’s still a pile of stuff out on our driveway — including electronics, sports equipment, and camping gear — that I have to either demousify or dump.

So, while Melanie enjoys Jefferson Park with Elaine Koskela and Jill Beals, I’ll be cleaning mouse poop off the camping gear she left behind.  And deciding whether I can still keep the computer where are stored all the letters I wrote to her in 1996-97 before we got married.  There is evidence the mice used that old thing as a hotel. It may be a goner.

She doesn’t know we’ve undertaken this project, and probably doesn’t even suspect it.  I hope to present her Thursday afternoon with a garage the cleanest it’s been since we moved in back in October of  2000.

As a warm up for today’s big job, I thought I might do a little demousifying for the EFL.