I spent a good chunk of yesterday learning about how my 20 year old stove is constructed. The basic problem was that my attempt to lock-out the mouse with my crude hole coverage with a CD was insufficient. Since Sarah and I were out at Home Depot looking for supplies like cabinets to put over the washer and dryer and blinds for the kitchen I wandered into the area where contractors go and purchased some contractor looking materials to plug the hole where the mouse comes in. I considered buying a big piece of sheet rock but they are huge so I settled for some pre-mixed joint compound and the fiberglass tape used with it. We met Ami at Home Depot incidentally which was odd because you don't expect to see a BU physicist without a car in Watertown, but he was buying blinds for Ilana who doesn't sleep well with too much light.

The stove was still in the way of patching the hole where the gas comes in but after taking the top of the stove off where the burners were I realized that I could probably remove the useless clock and light section of the stove that was preventing me from getting into the hole. After fighting with two wing-nuts for thirty minutes I managed to get the top loose, although not off because I was stripping a bolt rather than actually releasing the final connecting bolt. So I then spent a lot of time playing with the gooey joint compound and the tape, ultimately doing what I considered to be a great job of covering the entire hole such that even the pipe was covered all around it. I did all of this without having to unhook the gas, which I considered for a bit, but decided against after reading on the Internet that it was a really bad idea and would probably kill me, Sarah, and my unborn child to do so.

So I anxiously awaited whether the mouse would be out again last night. I was a like a kid at Christmas hoping for the great present that no mouse droppings would appear and I would be heralded as a super-husband and uber-dad that had fought off the menace of a deadly vermin. But Sarah had to pee in the middle of the night and also stopped in the kitchen to get a drink to refill. When she returned she let me know that I would be very "disappointed". At first I sprung into action thinking that she had gone into labor. I have a lot of spare adrenaline ready for this event. But she then let me know that labor wasn't the problem. The mouse or mice had left more poop on the stove.

Now I can take a mouse leaving a dropping on the ground, but when they poop on the stove it is a direct attack and an obvious insult and challenge. Last night there were limited poops on the stove, only about three, so I may have fended off the mouse wine and cheese party for the evening that had apparently occurred on Friday night prompting my all afternoon spackling escapade. So today I took the bait and with the mouse sized dueling gauntlet thrown down and patched the hole under the sink. I actually used so much joint compound that I don't have any left and may need to refuel.

I also investigated the feasibility of borrowing a cat. Jeremy turned me down because his cat Cloey, despite having lived in the apartment for a year, doesn't feel comfortable moving from one location to the next. Sarah nixed the idea of borrowing her sister's cats, although Curtis is a mean small critter killing machine, because she didn't want her sister to have a reason to be mad at her for asking for something stupid. Sarah assumed that her sister would find it wrong to put her cats' health at risk in order to rid ourselves of a pest.

The additional advice I recieved from both Matt and Sarah's mother was that a mouse has a very agile and soft head that allows it to travel it's entire body through a space no larger than the size of a dime. This makes it nearly impossible to ever fully blockade a mouse from entering your space if it wants to. Every one of it's holes even if sealed off can be quickly turned back into a full, dime sized entrance, in no time. But Matt, who has struggled with mice before, happened to have some mouse friendly traps that when tipped lock the mouse inside of them. He loaned them to me because his battles with his own mice ended in victory for him. So I now have two plastic traps with small bits of peanut butter in the back of them waiting to capture a little critter tonight. One is on the stove and the other is on the floor next to the stove. The strategy is: Go where the droppings are. I also cleaned out my toaster oven because I thought that I might be sustaining the family of suckers with the burnt charcoal crumbs that have been accumulating at the bottom of it for the past two years.