Household pests
A while back, the apartment had a mouse problem. A., since he was often up most of the night, saw a mouse scurrying around. I think E. mentioned that he’d seen it, too. Then I found a mysterious hole in a sealed bag of food I’d left in my room. Then I began to see the mouse itself: it showed up outside the common room, but escaped before I could catch it. Then, one day, I was tapping out an email and heard a rustling — it was rummaging through the stuff on top of my dresser (heaven knows how it managed to climb up there), with me ten feet away and the lights blazing!
Needless to say, when I crept over to catch it, it bolted. I discovered that it had chewed its way into a ziploc of chocolate-covered coffee beans, and had eaten the chocolate off of every last one of them. Coffee beans and chocolate dust were all over the dresser. (Picky little snot, wasn’t it.)
I decided that this was a good impetus to clean the room. I vacuumed up all of the beans, removed the radiator covers and looked for bolt-holes, stopped storing my luggage (could be nesting material!) under the bed, and plugged every hole I could find, which turned out to be just one very small gap in the baseboard in the corner. I couldn’t imagine even a mouse fitting through it, but I haven’t seen it since.
I even set a trap: a deep pickle-jar with some sunflower-seed butter and granola and a wooden ramp leading to the mouth. It was never disturbed. Maybe the hole was its point of entry.
Then, I was browsing the Intarweb today, and discovered that you can’t feed chocolate to your pet mice. It’s toxic to them.
Ha. Pwned.