At home with the mice

For the last week we have been trying to deter some unwelcome guests of the rodent variety.

Fair play to Cardiff Council, their pest control service came out the day after we called them and were very helpful in a) helping us realise this wasn't an insurmountable problem, b) reassuring us that this was a very common problem for lots of people at the moment, and c) advising us on what to do.

So we now have a house full of tasty poison, which we think is working, The mouse poos, that they handily leave behind as evidence of where they've been, are getting smaller. Which presumably means the mice are getting smaller, which means we've killed off the big ones and now the small ones are venturing out.

As an animal lover I do feel a bit conflicted poisoning mice, but less so after we discovered one had pooed on our toaster (and possibly in our toaster). We have now binned said appliance and are waiting for the mice to be eradicated before replacing it.

We have also been using a lot of anti-bac cleaning wipes and having a big tidy / clean under and behind the furniture. It's quite hard work, but necessary. If only, because otherwise you sit there wondering what is behind / under the sofa you're sitting on.

And that's not a nice feeling at all.

The war escalates

After setting traps to cath the mice in my friend's loft the other day, we returned last night to find that all the bait had been eaten out of one unsprung trap. And the other trap had COMPLETELY DISAPPEARED!

We have our theories on that. It could be a) bigger rodents than mice, who wouldn't be particularly affected by Little Nipper traps. It might be b) a mouse got caught, but not killed, and carried the Little Nipper trap off. It's possibly c) a mouse got caught, but next door's cat can get into the loft and took dead mouse, and trap, away to eat it (the mouse not the trap). Or maybe it's d) the mice took the trap away to analyse it in the lab and work out how to defuse future traps.

Either way, I'm off to the hardware store this morning to look at f-off traps. Because when the mice start taking the traps, it feels like they're taking the p---!

Baited with EVIL

Helping out a friend of mine who couldn't get into her loft to deal with roaming rodents, or set the 'little nipper' mousetraps she'd bought, I realised I had to set my animal lover principles on one side for the greater good.

However, I did have to laugh when she explained how she'd broken her self-imposed nearly-two-decade boycott of Evil Nestle to buy the bait. Apparently mice go mad for a Toffee Crisp.

A few minutes after arriving home I got a text to say she'd heard the traps go off. Looks like the little meeses do like the taste of evil after all...

Day out in Worcester

It seems a perilous place, albeit with free parking if you're willing to explore side streets. I got accosted by a slightly intense emotional mugger (you know, pours out his woeful life story, then asks you for cash) who seemed to have stalked us from when we left the SPCK Bookshop.

We had pizzas at a nice Italian restaurant, which a local mouse seemed to like too, because he kept popping up from among the cracks in the floorboards.

Then, much later, outside McDonalds, we witnessed the unfortunate sight of a 'well built' young lady adjusting her short shorts and standing on the street corner in just her thong in the process. Shudder.

The reason we were in Worcester was to see Nizlopi play at the Marr's Bar, a venue described as 'intimate' in the pre-show publicity. That must be 'intimate' as in 'tiny and rammed to the rafters'. It was the third time we've seen the band live, following Greenbelt and the excellent show last year at The Point in Cardiff Bay.

With hit-and-miss support from some random competition winners, it was a great night out. As before, they chose to play a couple of songs out in the audience, which, with the lights down, made the night very special. As an added bonus this time they played 'Clear' with the awesome rhyming couplet of 'shaolin' and 'towel in' (you've got to hear it to get it), which they'd promised us last time but didn't sing.

With the curfew curtailing the gig at midnight, they weren't allowed to do an encore (boooo! to midlands licensing laws!). After braving the aforementioned horrors to get drinks at the home of the golden arches, we drove off into the night, arriving home in the wee small hours, tired but happy.

The Last Kiss

We had free tickets to this new film at Cineworld, which used to be UGC, and is now also known as ‘the mice cinema’. Despite the rodent problem, the screening was full. From the look of the people who turned up, it appeared that was because the students are back in Cardiff, and they don’t know about the potential exposure to cute furry vermin.

Featuring Zach Braff – hilarious in Scrubs and impressive in Garden State – I thought The Last Kiss was going to be a comedy. There were some funny moments – but it wasn’t a comedy. In that sense it was a bit like life. Sometimes you laugh. Sometimes you don't know whether you should laugh. And sometimes you scream obscenities at yourself while pounding the steering wheel of your car. Or maybe that’s just me and Zach Braff’s character in this film?

A lot of this film – which dealt mainly with relationship anxiety – rang true. Casey Affleck steps out from his older brother’s shadow and puts in a decent performance. Braff is perhaps too likeable, and too unconventional in his looks to get hit on the way he does, but I think he’s quickly becoming one of the best actors working today. The show-stealing star of the film, though, is undoubtedly Blythe Danner. Maybe I’m getting old, but she seemed a lot sexier than her younger co-stars.

Jongudmund’s rating: 7/10