Do you have mice?
Our apartment is fucking infested with mice. It's seasonal. Kind of.
It freaks the shit out of my wife, and though I'm more content to sit with my laptop while the mice run around me and mind their own business, I have to admit that it is extremely disturbing to watch them run into my daughter's room while she's sleeping.
We have tried:
- poison
- traps
- walking around like spelunkers and filling up every goddamn hole in our ancient brownstone with brillo and some kind of cement paste
- a sound machine
Ha - funny story about the useless fucking sound machine - there are these settings on it, and one of them says "inaudilble" - the instructions say something like:
The inaudible setting should be sufficient for standard household operation. While sound emitted at this setting should not be audible to most humans, it is possible that those with extremely attuned hearing may still be able to sense the unit's frequency while it is operating at this level.
And then you turn it on - and I swear to god this is true - it's like this loud fucking emergency broadcast system tone that makes you want to move out of your apartment. IT's POSSIBLE that those with extremely attuned hearing might hear it?!? They make it sound like some shit only dogs and superman can hear, and then it's so goddamn loud my grandma can hear it from the living room and she's dead.
Fucking sales copy.
And forget about the other setting - I think it's called "LOUD" - it just sounds like Chernobyl. It must be like a party-gag setting or for use in a barn.
Anyway, we've tried all of these solutions and none of them work. We leave glue traps out, because they sometimes catch mice in them, but then here's our problem: getting rid of the mice once they are stuck in the traps.
I don't like watching them suffer, because in the end they are little living creatures even if they're mice. It feels wrong. You can't peel them off of the glue traps because once caught in that shit, their feet are fucked for life. A friend of mine just puts them into the garbage on 7th avenue, but this is about the most fucked up thing i can think of - they just sit there stuck to the glue trap and starve in the dark??? Horrible.
Typical fuckin hippie - he thinks he's being kind because he doesn't have to SEE them suffer or kill them himself. This beef is organic so the cow had no antibiotics in it when they held it upside down and slit it's throat with an hatchet the size of an airplane wing.
Anyway, I gotta take responsibility for them then and there - the way I see it, as soon as they're stuck in one of those things, they're frightened and in a horrible non-medicated panic attack situation. So, I lift the traps into a black plastic bag, (bare hands! tough guy! dad was wrong!) take it downstairs and outside, set it on the sidewalk, and I drop a truly gigantic 40-pound cinderblock onto the bag that causes them to disintigrate. They die instantly. It's the most humane thing I can think to do once their lives are fucked by being caught in toxic glue-cement.
Still sucks, but I wish they would listen to the hundreds of warnings I've posted for them in their holes and in their comments sections so that it didn't always have to come to this.
What do you do?
Erica | 
image via Village VoiceOk, so this little gem just landed in our FIPSbox. And as it turns out, 200 Fifth has no mice--or maybe they do, but the anon internet network namer who wrote in has no idea if they do or not. However, they still think the sports bar sucks a gigantic dizzle. Behold:
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