If someone had told me that living in parks would allow me to be so up close and personal with the wildlife, I would have hoped they meant bears, deer and bunnies. I have seen those cuddly guys but I wasn't expecting the vermin that I shared homes with!
My roomate D and I lived in a very large house in an oasis in the Utah desert. The house was so freakin' huge! It had 5 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms and 2 living rooms... all for 2 roommates. The basement had been converted into living space and was always nice and cool. Apparently all the vermin on the block were also enjoying our basement!
Everything was going smoothly the first 2 months we were living there. We thought we were alone. Then one fateful evening I put out a bowl of organic dark chocolate-covered espresso beans. YUM! That night things went from calm to calamity! There were bumps in the night, boogiemen in the corners, squeaking in hall. Yes, the mice had found my stash and we discovered we had mice.
So we had unwittingly invited all the mice over for gourmet caffeine-filled chocolate! Every day after that for the next month there were mouse sightings! God love D for tirelessly setting mouse traps, and emptying them. We kept a tally - 3 or 4 mice a day for a month met their end in our house.
During that mousy month, I spent my evenings hunting down entry points into the house. We had all entries sealed so where were they coming from!? One night while watching tv, D met a mouse on the couch. It literally crawled out of the cushions and across her chest! I've never seen her move quite as fast as she did that night, leaping to her feet and shouting. We immediately shifted into intense search mode.
Being environmentally-friendly rangers, we borrowed our neighbors cat for a few days. He was sent to us as a "great mouser" so we set him loose in the basement. I don't know how many mice he ate but he wasn't hungry for days!
Another evening while watching tv in the dark (to lure the mice out), I noticed a shadow on the carpet by my feet. I thought it looked odd and pulled my feet up onto the couch as I reached for the light. Thank god I moved because that shadow ended up being a centipede. (Like their evil scorpion cousins, these guys are minions of the devil!). I've never seen anything quite as creepy as a centipede on my carpet, crawling towards me, searching for my toes! I tried to keep my cool as I leapt onto the couch, screaming and pointing for D to kill it. (This blow to my outdoorsy-cool-girl ego was outdone a few minutes later when a mouse crawled across the room, causing me to leap yet again onto the couch, doing a very girly dance screaming "Kill it, Kill it!")!
While searching for clues in the basement I discovered a door I hadn't opened before. You know how you yell at the dumb girl in the scary movie when she goes to open the door? Yeah, you could and should have been yelling at me. I could hear the Pyscho soundtrack screeching in my head as I trepidatiously reached my hand out to the door knob. Upon opening, my flashlight illuminated a small room, or large closet, completely full of mattresses! The only way I can think of to get that many mattresses into this room would be to peel the ceiling off and dump them in! They were stacked on their sides smashed into the room. Then, as that wasn't enough, more had been stacked on top, to the ceiling! WTF?! In the dim light, I could see fluffy nests bulging out of holes in the mattresses. Apparently we were operating the best Mouse Inn in the county, complete with organic exotic breakfasts!
We eventually trapped and got rid of all the mice. After lots of bleach cleaning, we got rid of the possible threat of hanta virus. I even got rid of the f**king mouse nest in my car's AC system (after several humdred dollars of repair by the mechanic). We never did get rid of the horror that was the mattress closet... they are probably still there so many years later.
Happy Halloween!
