Another Mouse

Before I started this blog I would send emails to family/friends about my time in Thailand. One of those emails was about a mouse that was in my room at my host family’s house. The mouse was really loud and kept waking me up. Well, I have another mouse but this one is fairly quite…

About a week ago, I was laying in bed reading a book. It was about 10:30 at night, and I just wanted to finish the chapter before I went to bed, and I heard a loud rusting in my living room. I got up to see what it was.

Apparently I had caught a mouse in one of the glue traps I had set out for the scorpions. Now the glue trap is fairly small (about 5x3) and the mouse had only gotten two of its legs stuck so it was dragging the trap around trying to get loose. Now I had seen this before & usually they end up completely stuck as they try to get away. So I went back into my room and figured that I would go back in the morning and throw it away.

At about 2:30 in the morning, a loud noise in my room woke me. The mouse had dragged itself & the trap into my room and had lodged itself in the corner under my desk & had managed to unstuck itself…the trap was now empty & I now had a mouse in my room (although I had no idea as to where it actually was).

The next day I developed a plan. My bedroom door had about an inch space between it and the floor, but I had a screen door (that I didn’t use) that had a little “flap” that would stop things from getting in. So I set another glue trap at the very opening of the door & closed the screen right to the trap (so the only way in/out was to go over the trap). And I waited.

That evening I caught a slight movement out of the corner of my eye & turned to see the mouse walk up to the door/trap, smell the air, and then run away. It was smart. It knew that the trap was there. But I left it & hoped that eventually it would forget.

By Saturday I still had had no luck in trapping the mouse (although every day I would see it walk up to the door then run away). I figured that it was living someplace in my desk…there are two drawers that I cannot open because they don’t have handles so I figured one of those drawers. So on Sunday I went into town and bought some rat poison at the grocery store. Now I would NEVER use rat poison in the States. But in Thailand there is a decided lack of humane mouse traps (they consider the glue traps humane but I think they are horrible because the mouse basically starves to death…I figure at least the rat poison is fast).

So Sunday evening I sprinkled some of the poison in my living room right outside my bedroom and in my kitchen (because I figured that if they were in my bedroom they were definitely in my kitchen). And for the first time in a week I left my screen door open (didn’t want anything impeding the mouse from getting out of my room).

I was again reading in bed and it was again about 10:30 when I heard another noise in my room. I looked over and saw the mouse running under my desk again stuck to the trap. This time it took it 5 minutes to get loose (sigh of frustration here).

The next morning no dead mouse. But one of the “piles” of rat poison in the kitchen was missing (I had left two piles in different corners & each pile had about 4 pellets). I decided to leave the glue trap where it was (under my desk) and I went off to work.

This brings us to last night, I went to bed with no “mouse episodes,” but I at about 12:30 the rain woke me up. I lay in bed trying to fall back to sleep when I heard another rustling under the desk. I didn’t have to look to know that they mouse had gotten stuck to the glue again. Eventually, the sound of the rain lulled me back to sleep. I woke the next morning & the glue trap had disappeared! I searched my room for it & it’s gone…added to that, the other pile of rat poison was missing from my kitchen. And still no dead mouse. I’m kinda afraid to go home because I know that I am going to get surprised by a dead mouse somewhere (probably in my bed). And I still don’t know where that glue trap went…