Our old house was fraught with problems. Â There were (and continue to be) large cracks in the plaster, probable asbestos tape on the ducts and something of a rodent problem. Â When we first noticed that our wooden spoons had gnaw marks on them, we invested in a few mouse traps but as it turned out, the perfect solution was already in place.
Over an eight month period, we trapped two mice with mousetraps and three with the toilets. Â It turns out that, statistically, our toilets are more functional mouse killing machines than actual designed and engineered pieces of equipment that are intended for the purpose. Â Mousetraps are really not very good for anything, it seems. Â Toilets can handle mouse disposal, human waste and leftover soup that has gone mouldy. Â Mousetraps can sometimes trap mice (though more frequently the mice will abscond with the bait and elude the wire snap in what I can only see as a Matrix-style slow motion bullet time leaning back and avoiding the killing stroke kind of thing). Â There were a great many times where I would go to check the traps and find the bread/peanut butter completely missing, the trap sprung and no corpse. Â Evidently one or more of our mice had the ability to alter time and space.
Another odd thing that that house had was what came to be known as the pizza detector. Â Any time we prepared pizza of any kind (homemade or frozen), the smoke detector would go off, even if the pizza in question was not burnt when we took it out of the oven. Â The detector would very rarely go off when there was actual burning food (occasionally for blown-out candles). Â The smoke detector at the new house had similar issues until I replaced it. Â The new one has gone off for burnt food a couple of times but also for the barbecue and a campfire in the yard. Â Thank you, ULC for approving products so concerned with our safety that they will warn us not of actual life-threatening conflagrations but of high-caloric foods and elevated risks of mosquito bites.