#mouse saga

At long last I have uploaded a picture of the crack from which the mice emerged. This is inside my pantry in the wall abutting the apartment next to mine. The crack goes all the way to the ceiling. All of those cotton balls are loaded down with peppermint oil. I've not seen or heard the mice since I came back from Christmas, except for that one time with the cat. I suspect they are still alive, but so long as those cotton balls go undisturbed, I feel relatively OK about things.

Now I have to wonder where they’re getting their food. My upstairs neighbor is the one who passed away back in August, and I would assume they cleaned the food out of his apartment, though it’s still let in his name, which is just bizarre. My next door neighbor moved out while I was gone over break, so that apartment is empty and thus unable to provide food. This leaves the other upstairs neighbor or the bugs which I know reside in our basement. Either way, as long as they’re not raiding my pantry, I guess.

I’ve thought about ways to handle it, but I don’t think plastic would be a great long-term solution. Mice can chew through most plastics, and even with a staple gun (which I don’t have), I don’t think I could staple it down tightly enough that they couldn’t find a way through. My dad keeps insisting a 2x4 would do the job, but he hasn’t seen the thing in person, and I don’t know how I’d even go about securing that. Maintenance came by and took a look and he basically said short of renovating the whole closet, there’s not much that can be done. Again, the mice have not come through since I moved the catbox and scented the whole area with peppermint, so that’s really all I need. I’ll just keep on top of the cleaning and the peppermint, because that seems to have done the trick.

So I think it’s been about a week. Maybe just a little more. I’ve been keeping the kitchen meticulously clean and hiding all the food in the fridge. I also alerted the building manager, so there’s mouse poison down in the basement where my cat can’t get at it. I’ve been spraying with peppermint spray pretty regularly, and I laid a bunch of peppermint-scented cotton balls around the area where they’re coming from. The balls have gone undisturbed several days in a row now, so that’s a good sign. Tried to get mousetraps at several places, but literally every place I tried was sold out. Apparently this is a very common problem or people do not restock their mousetraps quickly. I’m about to head home for the holidays, so I will extra-meticulously clean tonight, empty the trash and whatnot, and hope that my countermeasures have been enough to keep them out while I’m gone. If they’re still alive, that is...

It’s a real shame that this happened right during finals because I have papers to be writing (not to mention Christmas shopping, ah!), but I managed to finish one paper today, so we’ll see how it goes.

So...any advice for dealing with mousies when you own a cat? A useless cat? I know cleaning is a big one, just keeping food scraps away and whatnot, and I’ll have to relocate her food at night, but no poison because cat, so what have you all tried?

For this, I intend to have the money to spare. I'd rather not have mousies about. I know where it came in from, I think. My apartment building is really old and the whole thing leans slightly westward so there are spots where the walls have cracked open to reveal the brick. However, to seal the crack in question would be...shall we say I'd need a Thor? Thor could probably fix it, but I'm just a tiny little human, so I don't think I can quite seal it as much as it would need to be.