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-.3pt;mso-font-width:95%"">Some
""Adobe Garamond"";color:black;letter-spacing:.3pt;mso-font-width:95%"">apartments come with free furnishings, others with free cable. Much to my dismay and disappointment, my new apartment on Gilman Street came with none of those things but it did offer one special feature. Free mice!
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color:black;letter-spacing:.1pt;mso-font-width:95%"">I'm not scared of mice per se, though they certainly can be startling. It's more that they make me angry because they are invading my space and eating my food. And no one eats my food without my express permission.
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color:black;letter-spacing:.1pt;mso-font-width:95%"">To solve the problem, my boyfriend Jarred (or Stubby to those who know him/have ever met him) brought over a safe mousetrap and loaded it up with peanut butter. Then we waited. And waited.
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color:black;letter-spacing:.1pt;mso-font-width:95%"">Apparently, either the smartest mouse in the world or one with a nut allergy moved into our apartment. Great. So we called in the expert: the pest control guy. He came over, put out a bunch of traps and told us he would be back in a month to check them.
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color:black;letter-spacing:.1pt;mso-font-width:95%"">But instead of capturing Franklin—he's been with us since the day we moved in, so we thought it was appropriate to name him—the exact opposite happened. We met Tomás, Franklin's best friend.
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color:black;letter-spacing:.1pt;mso-font-width:95%"">My friend Aime spotted a mouse dart out of our living room closet and towards the kitchen. I assumed it was just Franklin and ignored him because he's practically our fourth roommate. But then she saw another one. And while Franklin might be invincible and extremely clever, I highly doubt he has the ability to teleport.
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color:black;letter-spacing:.1pt;mso-font-width:95%"">This new mouse, Tomás, was not as smart as his counterpart. He hung out under the closet door for so long Aime and I were able to rearrange the traps in my living room into an arrangement he couldn't avoid. And within 15 minutes of moving the traps, we got him.
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color:black;letter-spacing:.1pt;mso-font-width:95%"">This turned out to be an even bigger problem than finding him in the first place because we used sticky traps, which I'm convinced are the most horrible things ever. Tomás was only stuck by his back legs and tried to run away, clearly unaware that I was trying to capture/kill him.
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color:black;letter-spacing:.1pt;mso-font-width:95%"">Watching a cardboard box scoot around my living room while the mouse inside was making the most pathetic, heart-breaking crying noise was just too much to handle. We tried to free him with a cooking oil/water solution and Q-Tips, but Tomás was stuck. Sadly, we decided the only humane thing to do was kill him.
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color:black;letter-spacing:.1pt;mso-font-width:95%"">None of us, however, had the balls to just step on him, and I most certainly did not want to prolong his pain or panic by leaving him in the box. It was decided that an instant and as-painless-as-possible death was in order for our most deserving mouse friend.
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color:black;letter-spacing:.2pt;mso-font-width:95%"">Stubby put little Tomás—box and all—under his right rear tire, got a little momentum going and poof! He was flat and in mouse heaven. Unfortunately, we knew Franklin was still inside and as bad as I feel about killing little mice, I feel worse knowing that they're in my apartment and not paying rent.
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color:black;letter-spacing:.2pt;mso-font-width:95%"">So we decided to put out some old-fashioned instant kill traps, a few new-fangled ones that look like chip-bag clips and some mouse bait. Turns out the combination works really well. Exceptionally well.
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color:black;letter-spacing:.1pt;mso-font-width:95%"">Within less than 24 hours of laying the new traps, we had caught and disposed of Franklin. Overjoyed that the invasion had finally ended, I walked into my kitchen to get a celebratory beer and frozen pizza. And that's when I saw the third mouse: Stumby—not to be confused with Stubby.
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color:black;letter-spacing:.1pt;mso-font-width:95%"">Stumby was no ordinary mouse, he was a three-legged mouse smart enough to work his way out of whatever trap it got into and was now dragging itself across our kitchen floor. I'm not sure who this upset more, me or him. I started to cry almost instantly because it was the most heartbreaking thing I'd ever witnessed.
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color:black;letter-spacing:.1pt;mso-font-width:95%"">Hearing my cries, my roommate Kristina came into the kitchen to help me get Stumby out of the house. As we pushed him onto a paper plate and into his final resting place—an empty Miller Lite box—Kristina offered this warning: ""Let this be a lesson to the rest of you! Leave this apartment or you will end up dead in a beer box too!""
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color:black;letter-spacing:.2pt;mso-font-width:95%"">Apparently when it comes to killing mice, threats are more effective than traps because we haven't seen once since then. Now that the ordeal is over, I certainly feel more sanitary but I'll admit it gets a little lonely not hearing the pitter-patter of little feet in the pantry late at night.
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color:black;letter-spacing:.1pt;mso-font-width:95%"">Have any foolproof mouse-removal techniques? Want some food for your snake? Let Jillian know at
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