Monday, October 13, 2008

Memories of Spring...

This is a blog post that I wrote back in May, and put on my MySpace page. I thought I'd re-post it here, to keep everything together.

Here is how today is going. First of all, I'll give you a little background. In our house, we have two bathrooms. When we moved in, we noticed that the main bathroom floor was a little creaky, we knew it was going to need to be replaced eventually, but put it off. The floor is actually uneven all the way into the kitchen, but did not seem major. This week, it has gotten a lot worse, I think the dry-rot has taken most of the floor in the bathroom, and the toilet seems to be only held up by the linoleum. Since this is the kids bathroom, we don't use it that often and didn't realize how bad it had gotten.
This morning, I went to go into the other bathroom to find a MOUSE SCURRYING ACROSS MY BATHROOM FLOOR!!!! I now have NO usable bathroom, but I really had to pee, so finally I went into the bathroom with the bad floor and did the hover thing that you do when you're in a gross public restroom and there's no seat protectors. Do you all know what I'm talking about? When your thighs start to ache and you think you are going to fall before you get done? Except this time, instead of falling onto germs, I might have fallen all the way through the bathroom floor. Can't you just picture that 911 call? "Help, my mommy fell in the toilet! I mean, through the toilet and now I can't find her!"
My next step was to figure out what to do. My first thought was to throw the cat in the bathroom and leave him in there for a couple of hours. I shut the door and put a towel across the bottom of the doorway so no little escapee would find his way into my bedroom. Our cat is fabulous, however, since he was locked in with no way to escape and he had to pee too, he just peed right over the drain in the shower. Good cat. The cat was unable to catch the mouse, however, but I did find the hole in the cabinets that he came in through. Not going to block it yet, though, cuz I'm gonna kill the sucker. Not that I have anything against mice in particular, but if they come in my house, they are gone.
All the while, my kids have been running rampant throughout the house. I was not too worried, I could hear the boys screeching and laughing the whole time, and everyone knows that it is when they are quiet that they are getting into trouble, right?
I was wrong.
Grant (who is 16 months old, by the way,) has now discovered that he is tall enough to reach the water dispenser lever on the front of the fridge, and was thoroughly enjoying the ice-cold shower he was giving himself. Now, remember how our floors are off? In this part of the kitchen, the floor slants back to the wall. So while at first I didn't think there was much of a mess, in reality all the water had run under the fridge to the wall, and was in a big puddle back there. I need to move the fridge to get to it, but it is too heavy to move full, so I am going to have to empty it first. And with all the floor problems we have right now, I'm not willing to leave it alone.
Marty came home this morning to deliver mouse traps for me, so I've set the traps and I'm waiting. The good news is I have the best husband and cat in the world. I would prefer not to have pet mice, however, so I have some work to do.


Update:
That night, we caught three mice, one the next day, and none after that. After setting traps for a week, we fixed the hole in the cabinet that they were getting in, and found where they were coming in under the house and fixed that, too. We have not had any mice since, but I think that since mice do not like the smell of urine, we won't have a mouse problem again for a long, long time.

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