The Pest invasion

Inspired by this nice story written by Hive account@blewitt how he had a nice smelly adventure living under the hood of his car almost making him vulture bait, I had to think about some nice smelly adventures than I had myself in the Caribbean.

You see one thing that a lot of people do not realize, is than heat does a lot things. Yes, it makes you tired, it also makes you more relaxed, and it also makes stuff grow a lot faster (with added water ofcourse). But this heat also means that all kinds of animal pest also grows and multiplies a lot faster. This is not always your own fault as in that you have a dirty household, this is just a fact while living in heat.

At a certain point in my house far up the hills of Sint Martin I saw a mouse running. My lazy Caribbean dog didn’t see a thing. Days later I saw that food packagings in my cabinets were chewed on. I was annoyed and wanted to get rid of the mouse. Poison wasn’t really an option because of the dog also being in the house. So I had to find the source of the nest. A few days later I was seeing multiple mice running per day. As it turned out, there was an opening under my toilet that lead to a crawlspace, and that is where the mice had their nest. I decided to put sticky strips under the opening.

The first days were total winners, mice sticking everywhere!! With that came also challenges, because what do you do with mice which are still alive but glued to a strip. If you let them free they will come back for sure, so I decided to drown them in a bucket of water. I didn’t like doing this at all.

Also around that time I was noticing also smaller mice running around. It turns out that mice make a new nest every 20 days, and these nests can contain 10 pieces or more. I knew I was fucked, because the new nest had already hatched (yeah I know they are not from eggs). Luckily the dog had started to finally see the fun of catching these slower smaller ones, and that also helped with the problem

By this time I am still catching 2 to 5 mice per day. Until it looked like the problem had been solved. By this time 41 mice were drowned, eaten by the dog, or thrown off the mountain. The peace and quiet returned finally, no more sounds of little feet trippeling in the night.

Until one night I step into my bed and smell something horrific. Turning the bedroom upside down and inside out to figure out where the smell was coming from, at a certain point I realized that it was coming from my closet. Throwing out all clothes I still hadn’t found anything until I open the door where the towels were. And here underneath all towels there it was: a liquified rotting mouse.

Now the smell of rotting tissue is something that does not surprise me, as I encounter it a lot at my work. But that is totally different than when this scent is in your own bedroom. I was horrified! Wiping away the liquid nastiness that was once a corpse from my closed I washed every single thing from that closet at boiling point. At least I thought. Most Caribbean washing machines don’t wash with warm water. So this scent stayed in my towels for while, and mostly in my head.

Every mouse I see now reminds me of a liquified one. So thanks again Hive account@blewitt for bringing back these memories. Maybe other people have some gory stories to tell as well???