I saw one poking it’s little head out of the burner of my stove the other day.

When living full time in a camper, you have to be aware of a lot of things that you don’t when you live in a house. You have a much closer relationship with your sewage and grey water; water in general becomes a major facet of life as your plumbing is much more exposed. Heating and cooling takes more effort as your insulation is more limited. There are all sorts of structural issues as well due to the shoddy construction of campers. After four years of off-and-on full time camper living it is obvious now that these are not meant to be lived in full time, but must be upgraded to be suitable for such purpose.

My personal war is currently with mice. There was a good deal of improperly stored food items around, so the mice over time have infiltrated and began to overrun the place. In the kitchen, under the cabinets, in the walls, in the floor; everywhere that a mouse could be they have been scurrying and shitting.

In the past few weeks I have shifted back to being full time in my camper, and it has been on the forefront of my mind to deal with this problem once and for all. While the first step was to remove all of the potential food sources from the area, empty every hiding spot of items, and clean in earnest, in concert I have been deploying anti-mouse tactical systems to eliminate the enemy.

The first item I deployed was poison bait. I’m not sure how well it did, but I did notice that it had been nibbled on. I’m assuming that the ones that ate it died in the walls - which is problem #1 with bait. The second problem is I have cats, and I don’t want them to get sick from eating a poisoned mouse…

I then deployed d-CON no touch traps and glue traps. The no touch traps did the job, but were finicky. They didn’t seem to want to stay open, and once they killed a mouse they were pretty much broken. The glue boards were much less reliable, in that out of 3 placed only one actually caught a mouse. They may have done better if I had baited them.

I have moved on to trying the classic victor spring mousetrap. I just received a dozen in the mail from Amazon, and at less than $1/trap are considerably cheaper than any of the other options. I suppose we will see if there is any argument for trying to build a better mousetrap, considering that these classics haven’t changed much since I’ve been alive.

There is still a lot of work to be done to bring the camper back up to acceptable full-time living standards, and the intruders have done their share of damage. There are lights that no longer work, I think they ate through the power cord going to the dvd player, and perhaps are responsible for the refrigerator dying as well.

Fortunately the enemy is a stupid one, being so dumb that I had left a bucket sitting in my office and one jumped in and couldn’t escape. The war is now progressing well on all fronts, and the ones that have been inhabiting the interior are now vanquished.

Next will be research in to how to find and eliminate enemies that are in the walls…