Thursday, December 9, 2010

Killed in Action ......... or is it?

Remember my ongoing battle with voles? They're kinda like a miniature mole.... or a mouse without a tail - that makes tunnels. They suck. Not my friends at all!

Last winter I was so skeeved by the whole process that I hatched a plan. That plan included a lot of manual labor, but most of it (well, pretty much all of it) was not done by me. Since we live in a manufactured home, and had a "foundation" skirting, the voles were digging under it and having parties all winter in my toasty crawl space.

Not cool!

My minutes and minutes of research on the internet educated me that to keep them out, I needed wire mesh at least 1 foot into the ground to keep them out of trees, flowering bulbs and my crawl space.

My house is 54 feet long and 28 feet wide. Yeah, that's a lot of digging. So it worked out perfectly when a family friend needed some money to go to school. The perfect plan was hatched and in about 3 weeks I had one sweaty 20 year old and a big trench around my house.

12-8-mice

Gene then installed wide metal flashing all the way around the house (it will also help keep it dry).




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Then after all that, the hole gets filled back in.

It's not nearl as "black tie" as it sounds.

By golly, it worked! I spotted quite a few "what the hell" holes around the house. You know, they dug down a few inches, hit a metal wall and then gave up. *ahhh... peace*

Wait. There's only one problem. Anything that was under there when it got buttoned up, now can't *get out*. EWW. Soon, as it dried out, and fall came and is now leaving, we started hearing some scratching and chewing. It sounds like this *scritchscritchscritch*I'mHungry*scritchscritchscritch* Only not as cute.

I took that for about 1.23 days and a bunch of traps were set. Slowly we heard less scritching and scritching as one by one the met their timely demise. Each one we think is the last, and today I get this message on my microwave (which is our bulletin board):


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I celebrate! Huzzah!



As I sit to eat my cereal I hear: *scritchscritchscritch*
*headdesk* (ack cereal!)


I feel like Wile E Coyote for some odd reason.
I have an order for Acme Mouse Traps and Anvils coming via fed ex.
*shakes fist at the sky*

2 comments:

Mama Mess said...

Tee hee, gotta love a note like that one!

Jessie K said...

Foiled again, by golly!

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