[Russic]

I can't believe how many mouse stories I have. Really long winded one here:

When I was a little younger and still lived with my parents we had a house in edgemont overlooking a very nice wetland area. My mom knew it would be a big mouse zone, so she'd always put poison around the house to keep them out. When it came time to sell the house she didn't bother with the poison. Unfortunately, the house selling was delayed by a few months and she forgot to get the poison out.

One night my folks were out of town so I had my girlfriend at the time (who would later become my wife) come over for the first actual night where we could sleep together and not set an quiet alarm for 3 am followed by frantic sneaking out of the house to avoid the watchful, judging eyes of parents.

I had a room in the basement and all was going well. The mood was set and I began to partake in the beautiful ritual of trying to nail my girlfriend while the folks were out of town. Something was odd though. Every few minutes we would be distracted by an odd sound coming from the window. Almost sounded like somebody was running their fingernails against the outside of the house. After a while I decided to go check outside to make sure there wasn't an issue.

I could see my girlfriend through the window with her ear to the wall trying to figure it all out. I could see nothing against the house so I gave the area next to the window a small kick. About a half second after I did my girlfriend jumped in the air and ran out of the room. Turns out my kick startled a bunch of mice behind the wall and they all started scurrying like crazy.

We moved rooms but that is just something you can't forget. Greasy little punks wrecked my sexy party.

Story doesn't end there, oh no. We set out what we felt to be a good amount of poison and naively assumed it would do the job. A few days later I go into my bathroom (also in the basement) and there is a single mouse dropping in the middle of the floor. odd. I turn on the fan and begin to have my shower. As I exit the shower there are two more droppings. I can't figure it out. I walk over to turn off the fan and a fourth dropping hits me in the shoulder. There were enough mice now in the ceilings that there were droppings in and around the fan going into my bathroom and when I turned the fan on they were being projected into my bathroom.

Quick side-story. My mom had a Styrofoam rooster given to her by a friend. Mainly given as a joke because it looked ridiculous, the rooster had a motion sensitive mechanism that would emit a deafening cack-a-doodle-doo at the slightest nudge. One day my dad threw it down the stairs towards my room, obviously releasing the sounds that freaked the hell out of me. In anger I walked up to the styro-basterd and tore the motion controlled thing out of his chest and threw it in the corner of the basement.

A couple nights later it's about 2 am and I'm screwing around on my computer doing what I can only assume was scouring the internet super highway for internet super porn. All of a sudden out of the dead of night I hear the ominous "cack-a-doodle-doo" scream from outside my door. You know when the answer to your inner questions are obvious but you have to go through the Usual Suspects-esque train of events to put the whole puzzle together? I slowly looked outside my door to see a mouse standing on top of the motion sensor I threw into the corner. Possibly the creepiest moment of my life. I caught him in a pizza box and drowned him. I feel kinda bad about that, but F him ... he's a mouse.

We called in Abel Pest control and we were greeted by a really nice guy who reluctantly told us that there may have been a misunderstanding. He thought he was coming to a business, not a residential address. He explained that they primarily deal with large infestations at businesses, but since he made the trip out and brought an army's worth of poison he'd set the poison traps and return in a week to collect them.

You have to understand the poison to feel the gravity of the situation. Each trap contained 4 chunks of poison. Each chunk was about half the length of a sharpie but two or three times the thickness (almost looked like a short sidewalk chalk). In order for a mouse to be killed by the poison, the animal must eat about 10% of it's own body weight. This helps keep the poison from being overly dangerous to pets as fido would have to eat a few pounds of it before he runs into trouble.

So this guy lays out about 10 traps, 40 chunks of poison in all and returns the next week to find each and every single trap licked clean. I don't even like doing the math to figure out how many mice must have been in that ceiling.

Sold the house ... the mice were gone but the basement smelled funny.