Ooh, fingers crossed, Suela! I saw a post today that it's 9 days until Christmas and was like "that can't possibly be right" but it IS. WTF.

Fuck, i think i just saw a mouse. Thought I heard a rustling sound near the door, decided it was my imagination, then out of hte corner of my eye, I thought I saw a black streak go under the futon. fuck.

Peanut butter on snap traps, Vortex. It's the most humane way of disposing of them, it's almost always fast and painless, and the traps come a dozen to a pack and are cheap enough to just throw out with the trapee. My dad used poison, they'd die in the walls and stink for days. Glue traps are right out, and I won't have exterminators for less than actual rats. Also, if you can find and block where they're getting in, that would be good, and worth the exterminator appointment.

Plus with poison they sometimes go outside to die and get caught and eaten by the local wildlife first. So the hawk or fox or cat ends up getting poisoned, too. So I second the something that’s not poison recommendation.

I'm a bad citizen of earth when it comes to mice. If there's one mouse, there are two. Baby mice reach sexual maturity in a couple of months. Mice gestate in a matter of weeks. An adult female can have up to 10 litters a year. A little mouse problem quickly becomes a big mouse problem. If you can swing it, I would call an exterminator.

Evidently my parents' mean old lady cat *was* doing something because when she passed away last month the mice showed up. We have a family friend who's an exterminator and he took care of the problem for them, thank goodness.

Mice are nature's protein - they are meant to be predated but too many humans and too much human stuff have shifted the playing field. It's not being a bad citizen of earth to exterminate them from your house.

We use snap traps with peanut butter - the traps are far more humane so I don't have a total meltdown when disposing of the body. We do have a cat, but the one time a mouse got into the house, the cat was like NOPE and headed to the top of the fridge.

Seconding snap traps with peanut butter. If you're squeamish (like me), there are covered snap traps (basically a snap trap in a box) so you don't actually have to see the dead mouse once they've done their job.

3 week stay-at-home starts tonight at midnight for my county. This is a relief, at this point, although it's triggered by ICU capacity thresholds which is troubling to think about. I may have to actually go grocery shopping rather than overuse DoorDash but that's the most impact it will have on my current lifestyle, I think.

Chiming in to agree with the recommendation of snap traps baited with peanut butter. My sister had glue traps in her basement, but her (elderly, fat, one-eyed) cat got caught. They got her loose, but she had glue on her paws, so walking was an issue. She ended up calling an emergency number, having to pay, and was told to use vegetable oil to remove the glue.