Mice, work, life, sheep.

[gement]

I've been stalled at work lately. Last night I sat down to spend the evening catching up and snapping out of it. And then the cat started acting funny, paying a lot of attention to a downstairs closet, when she is usually supremely disinterested in the downstairs.

Housemate says, "Oh, it's probably mice, she's looking at the shredded paper scraps." She sounded perfectly calm about this. The closet contained my things, and I was not perfectly calm about this. She seemed to think I already knew about the shredded paper scraps. It took me all of ten seconds to get untangled from my laptop and go watch the cat.

Tail moving in quick, precise angles about once a second, like a modern dancer doing isolations. She was terribly excited and trying to hold very still at the same time. I knew she was not just smelling absent mice.

Jason and I went down, thanked the cat for the warning, and proceeded with excavation. Final analysis: Three adult mice were living in the two bottom-most boxes, one of which contained a lot of candy from a decade-old long distance relationship. (I never had the heart to eat it, which was foolish. But now I can conclusively report that mice do not like jelly babies!)

The other of which contained all my yearbooks, all my photographs, and all the volumes of The Notebook.* Oh, and a few matted prints of the Doctor and other fan commodities, which I'd presumed were in my box of decorations, if I remembered I still had them at all. Almost all of which escaped damage.

I'm stunned. And very grateful to the cat. I know that as of a month ago the closet and garage were not infested, because arjache helped me organize both, so the mice didn't have time to really settle in and drench everything. There was enough candy that they didn't bother chewing on pictures. A bunch of Dilbert page-a-day calendar pages soaked up most of the mouse pee, protecting the photos. I took pictures of a few irretrievable things from the relationship box, but got a full capture of the details, so I arguably lost almost nothing.

meowse had time to come over and help us clear out the satellite nest site in the garage, bleach the floor, and lay out all my photographs on shelves in the heated laundry room. Thanks again, arjache, for helping me clean so I had a laundry room to use for this. Otherwise this would have felt a lot more crazy.

Still behind on the work, but today is another day. Life is generally good. I am reconsidering cardboard boxes as a primary storage mechanism. It honestly never occurred to me to worry about things chewing or nesting in my stuff; my family never had a mouse problem before.

Also, someone forced sheep to play Pong. I thought you should know.


* The Notebook was a paper-based communication system I invented in high school. I had never heard of a newsgroup. I just invented one. We filled 7 standard spiral-bound notebooks with notes to be read by the group.

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[gement.livejournal.com]

They ran for the adjoining garage, where their other nest is. We didn't find them in the other nest, which has much less obvious exits. I'm looking into humane trap options so we can figure out if they are coming in again.