Information behavior and a mouse in the house

One of the topics I’m keeping in the back of my head for a future library school paper is that of the information needs of new members of a community. E.g.: you’ve just moved to an unfamiliar place; how do you find out where the nearest place to get a decent haircut is, or the nearest dry cleaner’s, or the fastest way to get from point A to point B, or how the local government handles things like trash collection and recycling? (My mind is on all of these topics for rather obvious reasons.) I’ve blogged previously about the way online sources are springing up to supply this kind of information, and one of the things I may someday write about is the conjunction of the placelessness of the internet with local specificity, so that someone can learn the necessary new-kid-in-town stuff from thousands of miles away. I’m also mulling the enduring appeal of getting recommendations and advice from other human beings, whether it’s asking your next-door neighbor or asking Metafilter.

All of which is by way of bookmarking a topic to investigate, but also to ask for some of that other-human-being advice: I’ve just moved from a place where rodent infestations were scarce to a place where they aren’t, and yesterday I spotted a mouse in my living room. Dealing with mice is somewhat outside my experience, so: if any of you reading this know good way to repel them, would you mind sharing? My landlady has promised to set extra traps and recheck the basement for likely entrances. After much Googling, I’m going to set some traps of my own, try the oil of peppermint approach (which some people seem to swear by and others say doesn’t work), and see if I can borrow a cat. But if there’s any other way short of poison and those horrible glue traps, I’d be much obliged. I don’t like the thought of killing something so small and cute and fuzzy, but I don’t like the thought of hantavirus either.

(At least mice are somewhat less dire than backed-up overflowing plumbing — which did happen to me some years ago. In that case, the solution involved plumbers, a hotel stay, aggressive disinfecting, and steam-cleaning the carpets. Mice seem tame by comparison.)

2 Responses to “Information behavior and a mouse in the house”

  1. dale says:

    I’ve had good luck trapping them in a
    wooden box and just taking them out
    to the woods somewhere.
    Here’s what you do: take a solid box
    of some kind, with an open top. Put
    some kind of cover for it on the floor.
    Now: invert the box and set it upside
    down on the cover. Attach a thread to a lip of the box (now on the floor).
    Thread it over to the opposite lip and
    out, and tie that end up high somewhere,
    so that it’s holding that side of the box
    up off the floor an inch or so. Now
    you bait the trap by
    squeezing cheese or peanut butter onto
    the thread down under the box. The mouse
    gets under the box, eats the cheese, and
    also chews through the thread — whereupon
    the box falls down the last inch or two,
    and the mouse is trapped. Carefully
    holding the lid on, you turn the box back
    over and carry it off to somewhere where
    the mouse can be happy, and let it go.
    Pretty easy. You do need a solid box.

  2. wolfa says:

    Tame it, feed it radioactive cheese, then use your friendly mighty mouse to scare off the other ones?