Heads & Tails

Started some time last fall, mice and roaches have somehow overtaken our city. At first, I thought it was just my apartment. Maybe because I cook a lot at home, maybe Principe Rana left the sugar out after making his coffee and don't clean up afterwards, leaving the trace of sugar on the kitchen counter to tempt the little ones, but I was surprised to see a mouse in my apartment.

To be honest, the building that I'm in wasn't that well kept. I went for a week-long conference years ago and when I come back from it my apartment was pratically flooded from a storm and a ceiling leak, my lamp was crushed into piece because of a block of cement fell down on it. I thought someone broke in and trashed my place. I didn't expect this to happen because I live on the second floor of a 4-story building, how am I to know that the leak would affect my floor? When I called my landlord, he said there's nothing he can do and that I should have gotten renter's insurance. But I stayed because the rent is relatively cheap.

I remember a time where the laundry room in or building was infested by hundreds of flies like in a horror movies. Since the management didn't care, I went to a hardware store and got a few of these glue trap things and hung it in the middle of the room and a week later they became like fly-skewers that chameleons would definitely appreciate.

Mice are different, they are a whole lot smarter and faster. They are really irritating but they are really cute, if they would leave me alone I might even have them as pets. But then I don't like germs and I believe they might be full of them, so I got some glue traps around the corner where they like to roam in order to catch them. You have the understand that there are a lot of holes in my apartment, a huge cave thing behind the fridge and a pipe cabin in my living room. If I had my way I would have blocked it up, but I can't. So there are places where they can go and hide. I used to be able to catch them. At night, when one get caught in the glue trap, they would scream and make noise. I would feel very bad because I'm making them suffer, so I'll get Principe Rana to get up and "take care" of it. He'll get up grab the trap, showing it to me first to gross me out and toss it out the window, which I find it extremely hilarious. It's a good thing that our window face the backyard. Imagine walking late at night and a glue trap falls right in front of you with a mouse twitching, or worse the glue trap fell on your hair or your clothes. Ew... But after a while the mice learned what a glue trap is and where they are, so they learned to avoid them, so who got stuck on a trap manage to set themselves free. So now they just run around and play around as they pleased, chasing each other and only run back when I start to yell at them. Principe called them "Su Amigos" which means "your friends". My apartment is small, and I wasn't gonna take care of a cat.

My friend ES, my colleague SJ and I were talking one day and somehow the subject of mice were brought up. ES said that since the end of last year, she stated to have a mouse problem and SJ agreed. When I told her I had the same problem, she suggested that I get those other mouse traps that flap a metal bar over, because it snaps their necks and cause an instant death. She says it's more humane that way. All she does is smear some peanut butter on the metal and when the mouse gets it then "SNAP!" it's done. I'm still iffy about killing those poor mice, but what am I to do?

It seems the whole city is infested but mice. The other day, a mice went into one of our staff's office. Our office is in the 11th floor of this building. How did it get up so high? Took the elevator? I got into the office just because I was helping the staff installing a software, this volunteer came in, me and him surrounded the mice in a corner, he used a poster rolled it into a tube and trapped him inside. Then he caught the mouse's tail and went to the men's room and flushed it down the loo. He could have been a cat in his past life. I wonder if the mouse died. Back in Hong kong we have rats, which is a lot worse and I remember all the traps for rats and what people do when they caught one, they drowned them in a bucket which is a lot worse.

I wonder why suddenly they all got indoors though. Are we gonna have a flood or an extremely cold winter? Is this nature's way of telling use something big might happen soon? Are they sensing soemthing that human is not sensing? It's weird.