Camera Girl is a courageous woman.\u00a0 She will bravely rail against anyone who offends her sense of justice.\u00a0 Unfortunately, she usually does this when it puts me in the firing line of whoever she is challenging or berating.\u00a0 This can get a little dicey for me.<\/p>\n
So, she has the heart of lioness, except when it comes to mice.\u00a0 The poor girl is terrorized by the diminutive rodents.\u00a0 Something about their tails fills her with horror.\u00a0 And so, she wages a war of attrition against them in all the outposts of the Compound.\u00a0 Specifically, the garage and the large shed that houses the yard equipment.\u00a0 My own feeling is that areas outside of the house and its various attachments are outside of the jurisdiction of polite society and so a mouse or two more or less is not cause for alarm.\u00a0 But she disagrees vehemently.\u00a0 Part of the reason is that she has to go through the garage to bring the dogs to the fenced in areas she lets them out into at night.\u00a0 And if the dogs sense that mice have been in the area, they become interested and this frightens her into thinking that one of Stuart Little\u2019s relatives might make an appearance and trigger the dogs to catch and eat it.\u00a0 For her this would be even worse than one running by her.<\/p>\n
And so, she has taken to mining the garage and shed with mouse traps.\u00a0 Interestingly, seeing a dead mouse in the snap trap is not frightening for her.\u00a0 Once rendered inert, she discharges the traps at the edge of the pond and literally caws for Moe the Crow and Poe the Raven and their ancillary corvids to partake of the murine feast provided.\u00a0 I find this to be one of her most eccentric rituals.<\/p>\n
Anyway, a crisis has emerged.\u00a0 A year or two ago we switched from the venerable wooden spring traps to a newfangled jaws-like version made of plastic.\u00a0 She liked these better because they made it easier to release the dead mouse from the trap.\u00a0 But recently these traps have begun failing.\u00a0 Apparently, the mice were now able to extract the peanut butter that she baited the trap with, without the trap snapping.\u00a0 She would come back from her trip to the shed, filled with a sense of dread and tell me this tale of woe.\u00a0 The world turned upside down!<\/p>\n
Because Camera Girl had never developed the knack for setting the older wooden traps I have, of course, been recruited to become the baiter of traps.\u00a0 And also, I have been tasked with solving the mystery of the failed plastic traps.\u00a0 And it has been implied that if I fail to diagnose the problem and correct it, I will have failed as a man, a husband, and an engineer.<\/p>\n
O tempora, o mores!<\/p>\n
So far, I have installed the wooden traps with the prescribed bait that was provided to me by Camera Girl.\u00a0 That much have I done.\u00a0 But I have only just begun to investigate a cause.\u00a0 Could the traps be defective?\u00a0 Could they have gotten rusty and thus less sensitive?\u00a0 Might the peanut butter have become old and therefore easier to remove?<\/p>\n
My mind has raced to encircle this mystery within a thicket of possible solutions.\u00a0 But these are deep waters.\u00a0 I cannot be too hasty.\u00a0 A proper plan of attack is needed.\u00a0 I\u2019ll need a budget to purchase supplies, tools and instruments.\u00a0 I\u2019ll need a detailed schedule to properly scope the project and I\u2019ll need a scapegoat in case the project is a failure.\u00a0 Maybe one of the dogs.\u00a0 Updates will follow but I felt this project was important enough to warrant an introductory post to benchmark the effort.<\/p>\n
The single guys out there probably assume I\u2019m suffering the beginnings of dementia.\u00a0 The married men will probably understand that this is just one of the many accommodations a man makes to keep a wife happy.\u00a0 And after all the expression, \u201cHappy wife, happy wife,\u201d Is not far from the truth.\u00a0 But I do wish someone would invent a mousetrap with lasers.\u00a0 It would make the who thing much more fun.<\/p>\n
Update:<\/strong><\/p>\n War Pig commented:<\/strong><\/p>\n Mamaw used peanut butter in her traps as well, but when the diminutive rascals found out how to defeat that, she went to bacon grease. Mice, in Ohio at least, cannot resist bacon grease. Also the plastic traps tend to not give the same force as the wood-and-spring traps. A healthy mouse can get out of them and resist a broken neck due to their lack of dynage. Living on a farm meant constant vermin control. The little buggars aren\u2019t stupid. We have to change out methods and baits from time to time. Thankfully, a generation of mice comes along a few times per year. So anything learned from the last generation is lost to the grandchildren.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Camera Girl is a courageous woman.\u00a0 She will bravely rail against anyone who offends her sense of justice.\u00a0 Unfortunately, she usually does this when it<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,288,3366,818,1263],"tags":[300,83,965],"class_list":["post-30725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-humor","category-life-in-dunwich","category-ocf","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","tag-camera-girl","tag-family","tag-marriage"],"yoast_head":"\n