STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

I've never had a mouse where I live now (in the city of Chicago), however, my parents live in the south suburbs and when I still lived at home, ocasionally we would have mice.  I'll never forget one time, I woke up in the middle of the night because I heard a rustling sound in my bedroom.  I turned on the light, it stopped.  As soon as I got back in bed, it started again.  So I turned on the light, and walked toward where the noise was coming - behind my dresser.  I looked behind it and SCREAMED!!  There was a mouse w/a candy wrapper.  My dad came running into my room w/a broom, but everytime the mouse would come out, I'd scream and scare it away!  What a wuss am I? 

Anyhow, my dad always tried to use those traps where you put peanut butter or some food, and in the morning, we'd wake up and the food would be gone but no mouse.  Eventually, they worked though. 

I have always had mice problems, generally just one or two. But...here in Philadelphia, there is a real problem. I have come to the conclusion that it's not my apartment, it's the douchebag upstairs. We have glue traps, and sometimes (only in the winter) we will catch two a week, other times none at all for a long time. Luckily, my SO has not problems with picking the yucky things off the glue traps and throwing them out the window. Perhaps we would be better off with a killing trap but I can't kill them, no matter how yucky.

 

However...my sister once had a problem with rats...and that's a completly other story. It ended with them calling the landlord after her bf was BIT ON THE TOE BY A RAT WHILE HE WAS SLEEPING!

I live in the Bay Area, never had a problem here.

But when I went to college at UC Davis, near Sacramento, we had mice in the house several times. I think it was mainly due to the cats bringing them inside to play. One time it happended and I was the only one of my three roommates home, so I had to deal with it. After what seemed like hours of trying to coax it out from behind the TV cabinet, it got close enough to the door that I could scoot it out with a broom. The other two or three times a mouse was in that house I wasn't there.

in a freaky bit of odd timing, we have had two mice in the house tonight. im going to assume for the sake of the argument, that they were both the same mouse actually. cause otherwise, i would really have a big problem. one earlier in the day and one in the evening. the one in the evening was the more interesting one. so.....

at about 10 tonight, the bf sees a mouse run from the bedroom into the bathroom. the bf, being very quick thinking, quickly runs into the bathroom and shuts the door. i lay a towel down at the bottom of the door so the mouse can't escape. so...john and mouse are inside the bathroom with nowhere for the mouse to go because it's completly tiled in. and im on the outside of the bathroom. after a few minutes of john running around the bathroom throwing things, im getting kinda antsy...i wanna see what's going on! so, i very very quickly open the door and get inside where the action is at. please note at this point, that i have screamed every time ive ever seen a mouse in my life. yes, an actual highpitched screech. i get in the bathroom and there is no mouse to be seen. apparently he had lept up onto a towel that was hung over the bar and now he was hiding within the folds of the messily hung towel. im in the bathtub, standing on the rim, cause the mouse can't get me from there, right? john then slowly starts to pull the towel off the rack and that's when i see it! ralph! or is it stuart! either way he's fat and i can see him and i SCREAM! well...my screaming startles john and he drops the towel. who knew that a high pitched screech in a small tiled bathroom would echo that loudly? so now the mouse is hiding behind a little table thingie, and the bugger is trying to climb a electrical cord, to go where? who knows? john jiggles the cord and the mouse drops and runs to the door....and burrows into the towel layed down at the cracks. shit, is he gone? is he hiding? well, what's a guy to do? if john removes the towel than the door is exposed and the mouse can get out, and that's not good. so...john decides to stomp on him, smoosh him, smash him. whatever you wanna call it, it involved me pulling my turtleneck over my mouth, covering my ears and turning away towards the wall (still standing on the bathrub rim). at first john and i think he got out because there wasn't any movement or any squishy noises, and then it squeaks. and that's it, it was all over but the mashing and grinding and popping. yes, john stomped on a mouse in a towel tonight. goodbye ralph, no more motercycle riding anymore for you, no more aspirin carrying, no more elevator riding either (did anybody else read the books ralph s. mouse?).

so...all in all, one less mouse, but one less towel as well.

I live in a very urban, populated area Los Angeles.

Two years ago, there was one mouse in my BF's apartment that would kind of dart in and out randomly. We are very clean people, so this was surprising. The exterminator was utterly perturbed because the mouse wouldn't fall for the traps and we eventually resorted to poison. One night, two months after the poison was put down, we found the dead mouse on the floor. I have never heard my BF scream like he did when we saw that mouse. I had to pick it up and throw it away. ick!

My BF is STILL convinced that the mouse came home in my backpack from school. My college was in a not-so-great neighborhood so it's probably plausible, but I have a hard time believing that.

The exterminator told us that the mouse probably was lured to BF's apartment because there's so much clutter. BF has lived with his younger brother in the same apartment for ten years so of coure they've got ten years worth of their life posessions crammed into a 900 sq ft. place. We have since tried to get rid of as much clutter as we can, but it's hard when you've got tow pack rats living together.

 

laken1 wrote:

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roaches are all over in the south apparently - particularly these big ones

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~sighs~ Indeed they are. It's a fact of life if you live in the SE or SW parts of the country. We'd have them in AZ, but not usually the big ones. The big "sewer" roaches in AZ would come out when Phoenix would flush the sewers...yech.

And in Georgia, they're a fact of life, plain and simple. They are large and really, IMO, not afraid of humans. We had a serious problem with them when we first moved into our house -not an infestation, thank goodness, but they would come in regularly, and I work from home, so they were driving me nuts (I also have a roach phobia) - and it took quite some time to get a handle on things.

We finally found a place where we can buy the same stuff the "big boys" use to spray, and about every quarter, DH sprays the exterior. We have had very minimal roach visits since then, as long as he keeps up on the spraying. It's an issue for all our friends and not just us - especially in the warmer months.

We found that with Terminix, we still had a pretty major (for me, at least; for someone w/out my roach issues, maybe not so major). Now we pay 1/4 of what we were paying them, and we have less bugs overall.

We live in a wooded area and about a year or two ago we had a whole family of mice, like 3 or 4.  We finally caught them all with traps.  They were coming in thru a hole into the crawl space and up the pipes.  We filled in the hole and now have the bug guy come once every 3 months and the stuff he sprays outside also takes care of mice.  We haven't had any problems since then (thank goodness, I think they're cute and all, but not inside my house with all their little droppings, I totally scrubed every last inch of my house after we got them all ).

We once had a mouse that we were pretty sure came in with us in our camping equipment. We set a trap and caught it within 2 days but it totally creeped me out.

Now we have a mouse-catching dog. Since she is a Terrier, she lives to catch little furry things. In the 10 months that we've had her, she has caught atleast 5 critters on different occasions while on walks. She just bounds into the grass and hops out with a mouthful of wiggling rodent. Its so gross but we're pretty proud of her.

Maybe it's a regional thing... when I lived in DC I had roaches in an apartment, but after watching my next door neighbor's cat while he went away, and coming in one night late to feed the cat, and flipping the light switch, and seeing probably dozens of roaches scurrying down his walls for cover, I knew where they came from.  This guy was the nastiest, dirtiest person ever, and I didn't know it when I accepted his request to cat-sit (but did the second I walked in his apt.), but at least I figured out WHY I had that problem.

Thinking about it, I didn't have a mouse problem in Ca, I had an ant problem, and in FL I only had gecko problems (not a problem, I thought they were cute), but in MD and NJ I have had the mice issues.  I seriously think these mice come from our next door neighbors too.  They probably eat the bagels the neighbors throw all over their backyard, then crawl into my house through the pipes or whatever, for warmth.  I haven't seen a dropping in a couple days, so I'll probably see one tonight.  I never hear it.  Just see the evidence.  I guess we need to call an exterminator.  I just feel so bad for the little guy... mice are kind of cute.