There’s no end to them!
Another mouse - this time a bigger one - just slipped into my room! Its movements were quite slow and it isn’t that good at hiding, but it sure is silent when it scuttles about.
Looks like the one Vincent saw a couple of days ago in the common area.
Arrrggh!!
Another mouse caught; timestamp 2:49 am. Argh man, I need to sleep. I was about to write another post about an hour and a half ago, until I heard sounds of pattering near my bedpost. I was snuggled up in bed, about to enjoy an earlier night. That pattering was unsettling.
Spent some time after dinner designing and building mice traps, but I guess I didn’t allow them [the traps] to have their chance at field tests. I knew there was at least one mouse in my room at that moment, perhaps two. And one more in the kitchen as confirmed by Xiao. If I was to get any good sleep tonight, I’d have to herd the mice out of my room before stuffing the gap below the door again.
The sheer excitement of the prospects of another mouse hunt just wouldn’t leave me. Thus out came staff, boxes, cardboard and all, and I set out to waste more precious sleeping time. To catch a mouse, you gotta think like a mouse, and it certainly helped that this mouse thinks the way humans would a mouse, and not the way real mice usually do. This mouse did exactly what I expected it to.
This should be the small one I mentioned last week. As hypothesised, it was young and naive. I got it easy this time round.
There’s another mouse! It poked its head through, slipped into my room, looked at me for a good two seconds, and scrambled back out. That was before dinnertime. A small one, a young one I suppose, brave and naive.
It ran across my feet - aye, on top of them!! - when I was at my usual work terminal, typing away at the project report. Gave me a helluva shock, that. I jumped. It’s now behind my bookshelf somewhere.
No more sticky traps!
No time for mouse hunts.
My mountain of clothes is piling on top of the sofa (it avalanched twice), my camera lenses and gear are carelessly strewn on the floor, uncapped. Batteries are dry. Papers are unfilled, un-hole-punched, on the arm of the sofa, on the chair, on the desk, in my bag. Copies of Felix and the Reporter are collecting layers of dust near the fish tanks.
No wonder the mice like my room… there’re so many places for them to hide.
But there’s no time to do housekeeping!
Zoto 3.0 has finally launched. I wanna explore its new functions, and upload all my recent pics, but can’t afford to. Not yet.
Every waking (dare I add dreaming?) moment I have is now spent on BP. And fighting off wisdom teething pains.
It was my birthday yest, but I had no time to celebrate it properly. Well, I guess a dinner and a cake is more than enough. But it just felt so rushed. Nonetheless, thanks everyone for the well-wishes, gifts and embarrassing moments.
Can’t wait till the end of next week, when I can finally get back my >6 hours’ worth of proper sleep.
Timed this entry. Took under 3 mins. Back to work.
For a few nights last week, I let the mouse run free around the room. I just couldn’t be bothered to catch it. Once past midnight when the corridors were silent, it would come sneaking from the kitchen and slip under my door and start teasing me. I’d be sitting at my desk and it would make scampering noises from behind my desk, or when it was feeling brave, bolt across the room. It would exit my room as silently as it entered, the only thing signalling its departure being a brown dashing thing out of the corner of my eye. And then I’d stuff the gap under the door with old newspapers (always wondering why I didn’t do so sooner).
I decided I was being lenient enough. Last night, I laid the last of our sticky traps in my room, along one of its routes. It was having its fun playing around in my room when I went over to the guys’ rooms to sing Xiao happy birthday. I came back to a bunch of fur lying on the trap; it was stuck sideways, its tail tucked under the body, legs scrambling madly in the air, breathing heavily.
It’s times like that that I do not know what I should do… how to dispose of it… as humanely as possible. Well, in the end we did the necessary evil.
Xiao reported holes and nibbles in the loaf of bread on the dining room table. Unless my room mouse (christened Jeff[rina] for various reasons) has single-handedly colonised the entire flat, there might be more of its comrades lurking about…
So far in the Mus series:
Furry brown aliens (November 28th 2006)
Mus domesticus (November 24th 2006)
Two more caught (June 6th 2006)
Of mice and men (Sunday, June 4th 2006)
Brain: Promise me something, Pinky. Never breed.
It’s just as well that our current small group seminar focus is on biological invasions. This morning, we have caught one of the world’s top 100 invasive species, and probably the #1 invasive alien in the public eye. That’s one less to worry about. So much for my ethical resistance to mouse-trapping and killing! Them disease-spreaders and food-contaminators are up to no good. There’s some cost-benefit analysis to be done and the tide’s unfortunately not in their favour.
[geekmode]
I should do some modelling on how much the mice control problem is costing the country, the stakeholders involved, the relevant legal framework involved, and the conflicts of interest, and yadda yish.
For a local case study, that would be…
[/geekmode]
Oh, wait. Gotta start revision.
Ctrl+Y [geekmode]
To think that I’ve been outwitted by a mouse, not once but twice (and no doubt it won’t be the last, as detrimental as it may be to my ego). Just two weeks after Viv blogged about the return of the mice in her flat, Xiao spotted one in our kitchen a few nights ago. It was in a tight corner, behind the dustbin - one of those nice |_| corners. It looked trappable enough - the perfect ‘cornered’ mouse. So out came the cardboard boxes and I moved the pieces into position… and got the dustbin out of the way…
… only to have the mouse - in split-second mind you, I could barely tell if it even had a tail - dash from underneath the box along the footing edge of the oven and up a hollow chute in the shelves (which really shouldn’t be there in the first place).
I couldn’t sleep well that night. I couldn’t get over the fact that I underestimated the size and agility of that rodent… that I managed to let it escape from right under my nose.
Just now, I was on my bed, working on my laptop.
Then I heard it… the unmistakable sound of rustling plastic. I have crumpled-up plastic bags in the corners of my room - a habit I picked up from last term, a technique for alerting myself to the presence of mice in my room. I stopped my typing, and listened. There it was again. Switched on the lights, fetched my staff, found a box, camped near that corner. It appeared, ran and disappeared under my bathroom door. By then, I was figuring out a plan of action, or indeed, if I should formulate one and carry it out, or forget about it and just hop back into bed.
Then it popped its head out and looked at me - at least, I think it was looking at me - from that little gap under the door. Right, that did it. I sprung into action, my mouse-trapper’s instinct coming back to me. I turned on the bathroom lights, and spotted the mouse’s tail behind a random structure (one of those with an unknown purpose, as are much of the infrastructure in our Victorian flats), and I identified a |_| shaped corner in my bathroom flooring plan and set about directing the mouse towards it, using all the materials I had at my disposal. I succeeded… and my heart beat rate increased as a lioness’ would as she closes in on the kill. I poked at the mouse. It ran in! Then ran out again. Then the second time it ran in, I scooped it up - and midway through that action, it jumped out. I immediately lowered the box, while also reaching out for a makeshift lid in my other hand, ready to close its means of escape once it got in again. But it didn’t - instead it (again in less than a second) disappeared behind the radiator and appeared right on top (that was above knee-level), and jumped right over the box and under my bent body… and dashed across to the other side of my small bathroom and dived down a uber-small whole behind the sink.
I just stood there, stumped. And mightily annoyed. I stuffed that hole with paper and plastic bags, and closed off the gap beneath the door with all my past copies of Felix.
And now I’m blogging.
Urgh! There’s more rustling plastic… I shine the bedside lamp towards that direction. I see one perched on top of my rubbish bin. I jest not, there really is one! Jumping mad cows, I am seriously starting to cultivate a certain hatred for these darned mice.
I want a stun gun.
Two more mice down. All it took for the first one were the only two girls in the house, a few sticks, and a sabre. We flushed the mouse out from under/behind the microwave oven and intercepted its path with a box. My Nikon SB-800 Speedlight box and accompanying amazon.com cardboard have done us proud once more.
Our landlord came visiting with four sticky traps. He taught us the technique of mice-killing: once you get one stuck on a trap, you hold the edge of the trap and place the mouse under running hot water. We winced. I felt sick. None of us in the house had a stomach for such things. I told him we can't bring ourselves to kill them. So as a parting gift, we entrusted the two caught mice in his care - they were in a typical small fauna tank with a plastic lid top. Methinks he's just gonna bring them home and flood that tank with boiling water.
What to do? If we catch them and release them elsewhere, we're doing nothing to help curb London's growing mousey problems. But killing them… does nothing to quench my guilt.
They found another one stuck on the trap in the kitchen yesterday. It was squealing, struggling and shedding, and they had it disposed of in a plastic bag, left for dead in the garbage heap outside.
*****
As per tradition, my parents treated the house to dinner on Sunday. We picked a place in Chinatown, and we went for desserts afterwards. The night, if anything, was funny. My mom was thoroughly amused by the very interesting bunch of individuals who are my housemates… and I daresay my dad had a great time chatting with all of them. In the words of Drew Carey, "a thousand points apiece!" And the great thing was, for the first time in all the meet-the-parents sessions, I could have my parents and my friends conversing in Cantonese.
*****
On Monday my parents and I went to Bugis St for lunch. Coincidentally, Kamil and Vincent came in right after we placed our orders. So they had more chats with my dad…
We rented a car, and after some great difficulty in hunting down a proper roadmap for Britain, proceeded to navigate our way to Silwood. Took nought but two hours thereabouts, not too bad. Brought them - silently - about Silwood, showing them my room and pointing out the campus, and the woods where I work. There was a bit of loud voicing of concerns over me working alone in the fields but I think I was a bit harsh there when I retorted - there's nothing my parents can do that would stop me from doing what I need to do.
We checked into the hotel and headed into nearby Windsor for dinner. Oh boy… that dinner… not the dinner per se but what was being conversed about over dinner… much was discussed… a lot was revealed. All pretty cool.
Silwood beckons, my parents dropped me off this arvo after lunch before going to Heathrow. They were here only three days but it seemed like they were around for ages. Am quite glad, no, very glad, that they came…
It takes three guys and a girl to catch one mouse. It doesn't matter that we all suck at mouse-catching. Thing is, there are at least four more mice on the loose (we suspect there are many more), and one in my room. I slept ill at peace on Friday night - or whatever was left of it after we gave up on the other mice when dawn broke through - and for a very good reason too. My rodent roommate loved to jump up my bedpost and grin at me while I slept. Aww hell. I like critters and cute mousey furballs, but not when they eat through my supermarket bags and packingings to contaminate my food stock, share our toilet, and scuttle about in the kitchen!
*****
Atsuko's returning to Japan soon, so we enjoyed a great Japaneseque evening at Abeno Okonomi-yaki. All these night outs. Ahh…
*****
Meanwhile, my parents have come to town, and they'll be staying till Tuesday. So far, things have been pretty interesting… but I think I'll struggle to come up with things to do while they're in Ascot/Silwood!
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