Forgive the spelling errors. I need to get some work done and don't have time to proof.
The shark thing always gets me. Less so now because I can rationalize better than when I was a wee lad. I just hate the feeling that something could be swimming below me without my knowledge. I still do stupid things like get freaked out when weeds brush against my leg in Sylvan Lake. Last I checked there weren't too many alpha predators in Alberta lakes.
My big one nowadays is mice. When I was a teenager we lived in Edgemont overlooking a very nice marsh/park/valley thing. Every year my mom would put out mouse poison as the park was clearly a mouse haven. Every now and then one would find its way into our house and would be dealt with efficiently.
One year my folks decided to sell. In the busyness of getting things ready my mom neglected to put out the poison (along with other staples of the spring season). This would prove to be a horrible, horrible mistake.
My mom had this ridiculous styrofoam rooster with a motion activated rooster call. My room was in the basement at the time, and being a teenager I would sleep in often. One day my dad decided to be a smart ass and throw something at the rooster, setting it off at 9am on a saturday. I got up, tore the motion sensor out of the rooster and tossed it in the corner.
About a week later I'm on my computer at 2am and suddenly the rooster sound goes off. That is probably the only time I'll ever find a rooster yell to be absolutely terrifying. I looked over slowly to see a mouse standing on the sensor I had tossed in the corner of the room.
That was the last mouse sighting for a couple of weeks. My folks were going out of town and my girlfriend at the time was going to come over and stay the night for the first time (giggity). Naturally I was quite excited. We were in my bed and things were progressing just swimmingly when I kept hearing what I thought was somebody scratching at the door. It was loud enough that we had to take a moment to figure it out. Walking around the room we couldn't determine if it was actually in my room or in the bathroom next to it. I figured finally it was probably a cat outside the window in the bushes, so I went outside to inspect. Through the window I could see my girlfriend studying the wall very closely, and she put her ear against it. I gave the outside stucco a little kick and almost immediately she jumped back about 3 feet. There were mice in the walls and they were everywhere.
Then things started making sense. The little noises you'd hear weren't just branches blowing against the house. I started thinking about my bathroom fan that seemed to be catching on something. I figured it had loosened and was nicking a piece of plastic. I walked into my bathroom, turned it on and stood underneath. Within about 10 seconds I started getting pelted with mouse sh*t. It wasn't nicking plastic, it was a high mouse traffic area and they were sh*tting near the blades and it was sucking it in and launching it down into my bathroom.
My mom called an exterminator (I still remember it was Abel). The guy showed up and was incredibly nice. He said he felt embarrassed that nobody told my mom that they generally only do large jobs, but that he'd help her out anyway. He came prepared to do a warehouse, so he had feed stations that could murder an army. Inside each station was 4 large spikes similar in size to sidewalk chalk. A mouse would need to eat 10% of it's body weight to die, and seeing as they are lightweights to begin with, each spike could kill a bunch of them. He dispersed them throughout the basement and the outside and made an appointment to return the following week.
When he made it back the next weekend he looked shocked. I walked out onto the front lawn to see every feed station he had, totally empty. He'd seen warehouses not require that much poison.
The house would sell not long after and my parents moved into the middle of a giant field near Okotoks. They have 5 cats now that do nothing but patrol and kill. I love cats.
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