Monday, March 19, 2007
In rodentia
So as you may have heard by now, I've had some mouse problems in my apartment. Friday evening was the final straw, it seems, for both my tolerance and my sanity. I was sitting in a chair in my living room, innocently browsing the web, when all of a sudden, a mouse nonchalantly wanders out from under my couch. Naturally, I jumped up and screamed, "Ugh! Get out of my house, mouse!" But apparently this mouse (let's call him Giorgio) was a little hard of hearing, because he took "get out of my house" to mean "retreat to the kitchen." A little while later, after a quick trip to the store to purchase more traps, I was standing at the kitchen counter filling the traps with peanut butter when Giorgio darted out from under my cabinets and scurried under the stove. Not wanting to spend the rest of my evening playing the cat role in his little cat-and-mouse game, I immediately sought shelter at Rob and Monika's house, where I spent the night in their mouse-free office/makeshift guest room.
The next morning, I stopped by my landlord's office to ask whether I could be moved to a new apartment that did not have mouse problems. They told me it wouldn't be financially feasible for them to move me to another one-bedroom apartment, but that it was a moot point anyway because a) they didn't have any one-bedroom apartments open, and b) all of the buildings were having problems with mice.
And so I have decided to wave the white flag. I give up. If the mice want my apartment that bad, they can have it. Even if I do somehow manage to seal off all the gaps in the floors to prevent further intrusion (a project that I'm now kind of afraid to finish, since my landlord gave me some bait packets that are supposed to make the mice sick, then compel them to leave the apartment to die, and I have visions of them not being able to find a way out and therefore dying on my kitchen floor), I doubt I'll ever really feel comfortable in this apartment again. Unfortunately, in just the small amount of research I've done since I made this decision on Saturday, I've come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a charming, well-maintained, affordable apartment. I blame shows like Friends and Sex and the City (not to mention movies like Bridget Jones's Diary and Amelie, both of whose apartments I covet) for giving me unreasonable expectations that such a thing might actually exist.
So as you may have heard by now, I've had some mouse problems in my apartment. Friday evening was the final straw, it seems, for both my tolerance and my sanity. I was sitting in a chair in my living room, innocently browsing the web, when all of a sudden, a mouse nonchalantly wanders out from under my couch. Naturally, I jumped up and screamed, "Ugh! Get out of my house, mouse!" But apparently this mouse (let's call him Giorgio) was a little hard of hearing, because he took "get out of my house" to mean "retreat to the kitchen." A little while later, after a quick trip to the store to purchase more traps, I was standing at the kitchen counter filling the traps with peanut butter when Giorgio darted out from under my cabinets and scurried under the stove. Not wanting to spend the rest of my evening playing the cat role in his little cat-and-mouse game, I immediately sought shelter at Rob and Monika's house, where I spent the night in their mouse-free office/makeshift guest room.
The next morning, I stopped by my landlord's office to ask whether I could be moved to a new apartment that did not have mouse problems. They told me it wouldn't be financially feasible for them to move me to another one-bedroom apartment, but that it was a moot point anyway because a) they didn't have any one-bedroom apartments open, and b) all of the buildings were having problems with mice.
And so I have decided to wave the white flag. I give up. If the mice want my apartment that bad, they can have it. Even if I do somehow manage to seal off all the gaps in the floors to prevent further intrusion (a project that I'm now kind of afraid to finish, since my landlord gave me some bait packets that are supposed to make the mice sick, then compel them to leave the apartment to die, and I have visions of them not being able to find a way out and therefore dying on my kitchen floor), I doubt I'll ever really feel comfortable in this apartment again. Unfortunately, in just the small amount of research I've done since I made this decision on Saturday, I've come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a charming, well-maintained, affordable apartment. I blame shows like Friends and Sex and the City (not to mention movies like Bridget Jones's Diary and Amelie, both of whose apartments I covet) for giving me unreasonable expectations that such a thing might actually exist.
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