The kids Call it Jungle rice

The tell tale sign of rodents. The rodents I refer to our little brown mice. Cute, but filfthy.
Mouse droppings resemble black rice. The kids call it jungle rice.
We live in a house that was patched together in 3 sections. It was built on a concrete slab, and has no basement. The Hot water pipes are encased in the slab cement. The Furnace used to reside right in the middle of the house. The house was heated by fuel oil and there was a pipe for fuel oil and propane gas for the stove that came in.

When we found out the heat exchange was cracked on the furnace and the well was dry. We went to the bank and borrowed $12000 to move the furnace and pump out to a back room, and then make the kitchen bigger. It all went according to plan and we couldn't have been more pleased. That would not last long.

Little did we know, that replacing the gas stove and water heater with electric, left a nice open underground tunnel , entombed in cement. A mouse pipeline. The empty unused propane pipe From the backyard brought hundreds of mice into the kitchen and into our stove. It wasn't too many months before we could no longer store our pots and pans in the oven drawer. The jungle rice was everywhere. The bottom drawer of the oven became the place mice came to die. Traps filled with cheese and peanut butter took their places. If they were lucky enough to make it past the bottom drawer they would climb up the inside of the oven and out onto the stove top and beyond. We purchased 2 cats. They kept a nightly vigil by the stove. When the mice were active under the stove you could see the cats, and watch their eyes. Not moving a muscle, their eyes darted back and forth never taking their eyes off their prey. When the mice were brave enough to venture out we would hear a scuffle, a meow and the race was on. Most times a cat would run into the room chasing a long tailed creature. YUK! I shudder as I recall. Under the chair, under the newspaper, behind the TV they would run. These cats were not hunters, they loved to play, most of the time they would lose them. Leaving us to walk on eggshells for days until we could locate the small intruder.

Cooking was dicey. I always had bleach and sanitizer on hand to clean up before I cooked. But nothing is more unnerving than to see the passing of fur and a tail under a burner while you are cooking. OR the occasional brave mouse who would venture out of a burner while it was on high, glowing red from the heat, with a pot of boiling spaghetti above it. I can't tell you how it feels to sit at the dining room table and see the cover on a pan move, then the flash of a tail, or wake up and find food caught in the burner. The food being too big for the mice to bring to their nest. I know ...I know... My husband said all the time if you don't leave food out they won't come up...sometimes I couldn't help it. Well one day, what I feared the most was about to happen. I was getting ready to clean up the dishes from the night before. There was a pan on the back burner, with the lid down. I lifted the lid, and there laying on its side in the leftover food was a dead mouse. A Fat dead mouse. When it crawled into the pan, it must have knocked the lid down and was trapped. Eating to his hearts content, he must have ran out of air and died. {{shudder}} I said "Oh God, I knew it, I knew this would happen" UGH! The kids ran out ..."What Mom?" and I said "hey wanna see what we are having for dinner?" My son has a friend over. They peered in the pan and Jim said to Tommy, "Hey Tommy wanna eat at my house tonight?"