Louisville Magazine

MAY 2014

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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8 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 5.14 Inter-office MEMO Our household is currently battling the most evolved rodent on the planet. For a month now, this skittish little beast has avoided seven traps. We named him Mystical after one morning when we found a snap trap calmly unhooked, the peanut butter gobbled up. Unlike most mice, this bold intruder struts through the kitchen when we're sitting at the table or loading the dishwasher. Te other night my husband threw an apple at Mysti- cal. He'd had a few beers (my husband, not the mouse) so perhaps his aim was of. Barely grazed by the fruit, Mystical trotted of like a baseball player who had just earned a walk to frst base. We also once had a rat jump to his death in our toilet. Tat's a long story though…. Anne Marshall Senior writer I had a raccoon that would come in the win- dow I left open as a cat door. I would come home from the bar where I worked and fnd Henry (that's what I named the raccoon) eat- ing cat food. He didn't seem frightened of me. Sometimes I would fnd him farther into the apartment. I had a dowel rod that I named the "coon stick," and I would tap him on the butt to get him to move through the house. He would get upset and I would stop for a second and we would talk calmly about how he wasn't my pet and we were not buddies. A friend came to visit. Henry stopped by and scared the crap out of him. My friend yelled and screamed until the varmint jumped out the window, fell two fights and ran away. I have since learned to shut the window. Why was that so hard? Suki Anderson Art director We've had our share of unwelcome animal intruders in our house — mice, squirrels, Some buddies and I lived in a three-story fre hazard during my senior year at Ohio Uni- versity. In the wintertime, a squirrel sublet the attic. Every now and then, usually at 2 a.m. the night before an exam, you'd hear the tiny monster's feet scampering on the other side of the ceiling, and then —THUD — he'd hit a wall. Silence. Um, the squirrel didn't just die, did he? Because I really don't want to have to go up there and…. More scampering. THUD. Our landlord hired a toothless townie (he must've been named Jethro), who set up a cage in the attic. A few days later, Jethro's rusty pickup coughed into a parking space in front of our place again. He collected his trap, which now imprisoned a squirrel bouncing around as if the metal were electrifed. "What happens to the squirrel?" I asked. "Dinner," Jethro answered, joking (?). Josh Moss Editor Got a good story about animals invading your home? pantry moths, fruit fies — but the most persistent critters have been the Pharaoh ants. No matter how much caulk I plug under kitchen windowsills and along cabinet edges, they fnd a way in. All they need is a hole the size of a pen tip, and hundreds pour in within a few hours. Luckily, they lead you right to the entrance hole because they're perfectly brainless. So I put drops of Terro (sweetened boric acid) in their path and they congre- gate around the pools like cattle at a trough, load up their bellies and rush back into the walls to regurgitate for the hive-stayers. Nice system, but it's not complete; a few always survive to build the volume of the colony back to foraging strength. For me, Terro is like shampoo: Apply, rinse, repeat. Jack Welch Senior editor "Mommy, mommy, momma, mommy, hey mommy, Mandy, mommy, momma, MOMMY?" Mandy Wood Advertising account executive My senior year in college at UK, I lived in a house of campus with three other girls. We caught fve mice, had a couch full of feas (from the neighborhood cat that we sometimes fed and named Judy) and had a colony of ants dropping from the ceiling in one of the rooms. Te only thing that didn't come around was our landlord…until one day when we smelled a dead animal up in the attic. We fnally got Crusty (our nickname for said landlord) over to inspect it and he wasn't able to fnd the animal. What he did fnd was a thawed and rotting piece of raw fsh from the freezer that had been put in a bowl above the fridge (likely placed there by a party "guest" making room for ice or bourbon). Crusty probably thought we were delusional with all the complaints, but I promise the rest were really there! Mary Chellis Austin Associate editor I live in a house that is more than a hundred years old, and my family likes it quite a lot — and apparently so do river bats. I can tell you two things about the experience: 1. It is disconcerting to have a blind fying rodent at a dinner party. 2. Te fying rodent in question is none too happy about it either. A call to a local exterminator brought just the sort of person you would think makes his living ridding a home of bats (think a cross between John Goodman and Bela Lugosi). When he fnished his almost nonexistent inspection, he took me aside and informed me that we had THOUSANDS of bats living in the walls of our home. THOUSANDS. I was fummoxed and horrifed. John Good- man/Lugosi explained to me that bats need only one inch of space in which to live. Tey just hang upside down all day and wait for the moonlight. He told me bats are actually really lovely creatures, and informed me that they live in complex communities and eat pests like mos- quitoes for dinner. I had no idea how one gets rid of thousands of bats and was pretty much making plans to move or burn the house to the ground like the end of From Dusk Till Dawn. Ridding your house of bats is pretty simple: fnd out where the bats are getting in (for us, about a foot-long slit under the dormer on the third foor), modify the opening so that only one bat can crawl through at a time, and add a trap door that will snap closed and not allow one of the Stellalunas re-entry. Te thing is, if you have more than a thou- sand bats in your home that are used to fying into the night sky by the dozens, and suddenly each hungry bat has to line up in a queue, the bats get pretty vocal and agitated. Te walls began undulating with the gridlock, and no amount of therapy will ever get the sound of a thousand bats exclaiming, "What's the holdup?!?!" out of my head. Never. Once the bats had fown away, the hole was sealed up. About a week later, I saw a tiny, undernour- ished river bat peeking out of the air vent in my bathroom. When I got a towel, he literally fell into it, such was his feebleness, and he looked at me as if to say, "Where did everybody go?" I was all apologies and took him to the open win- dow, where he miraculously jettisoned himself into the night sky. I closed the window with a small shudder and wished him the best of luck. Jon Lee Cope Contributing editor 1-11.indd 8 4/21/14 9:18 AM

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