the daily rant

[moparwacko]

Off the car subject,but..... Weil Mclain boiler **** the bed 4 days ago, cracked, leaking, blah, blah. Replaced the whole thing $6k, so be it 25 yrs was a good run. Plumber spent 12 hrs replacing it, wouldn't fire. He ended up replacing the brand new aquastst, good to go, until it wasn't a day later. Then had to replace that aquastat as it wouldn't receive low voltage signal. All good for a day until it wouldn't shut the circulator off. He just left again with another new aquastst with everything good to go.
Soon I will be an experienced bioler technician.
These new digital controllers are a total piece of crap, I asked where my old unit was, as it was flawless for 25 years.

 

[Sahara]

I’m late to the game finding the posts about cats vs. mice, but here’s my two bits. We have four cats, down from five a few years ago. They spend days outside from April until November. I bet you won’t find a live mouse within a block of our house. Some mornings the carnage is disgusting, dead mice everywhere until they get them cleaned out. But I have a few mouse pointers. First off, peanut butter is over rated as mouse bait. Use fresh popcorn. It is mouse kryptonite and they can’t lick it out of the trap. Which brings me to my mouse story…
Decades ago I lived in a formerly abandoned house out in the middle of nowhere. Fighting mice was a daily thing. I had one that I could not trap. He would get into my household garbage and chew a hole in the bag so that when I lifted the bag all the garbage would spill out. I tried trapping him, to no avail. I even positioned the trap so that he had to go over it to get to the garbage. Yet he still got to the garbage without setting the trap off. I watched him one night. He would place his right legs on the baseboard and his left legs on the floor and straddle the trap climbing over it. I baited it with peanut butter and would find a still set trap with no peanut butter and a pile of mouse poo beside it. He would spend hours delicately licking the peanut butter out of the trigger without setting the trap off. That takes balls, that does. I finally caught him by making the trigger so sensitive that just walking nearby on the floor would set it off. I finally caught him that way but I felt bad, in a way. He was a worthy opponent.

 

[440 4 speed]

I’m late to the game finding the posts about cats vs. mice, but here’s my two bits. We have four cats, down from five a few years ago. They spend days outside from April until November. I bet you won’t find a live mouse within a block of our house. Some mornings the carnage is disgusting, dead mice everywhere until they get them cleaned out. But I have a few mouse pointers. First off, peanut butter is over rated as mouse bait. Use fresh popcorn. It is mouse kryptonite and they can’t lick it out of the trap. Which brings me to my mouse story…
Decades ago I lived in a formerly abandoned house out in the middle of nowhere. Fighting mice was a daily thing. I had one that I could not trap. He would get into my household garbage and chew a hole in the bag so that when I lifted the bag all the garbage would spill out. I tried trapping him, to no avail. I even positioned the trap so that he had to go over it to get to the garbage. Yet he still got to the garbage without setting the trap off. I watched him one night. He would place his right legs on the baseboard and his left legs on the floor and straddle the trap climbing over it. I baited it with peanut butter and would find a still set trap with no peanut butter and a pile of mouse poo beside it. He would spend hours delicately licking the peanut butter out of the trigger without setting the trap off. That takes balls, that does. I finally caught him by making the trigger so sensitive that just walking nearby on the floor would set it off. I finally caught him that way but I felt bad, in a way. He was a worthy opponent.

Did you really feel really bad, kind of like the ones who kill the trophy elephants lions etc??
My father believed that if you kill something you should be ready to eat it or it is a problem, like mice, but we had cats. Squirrels were to be eliminated immediately because they chewed holes in the granary's. Just kidding on the first sentence.

 

[Sahara]

Did you really feel really bad, kind of like the ones who kill the trophy elephants lions etc??
My father believed that if you kill something you should be ready to eat it or it is a problem, like mice, but we had cats. Squirrels were to be eliminated immediately because they chewed holes in the granary's. Just kidding on the first sentence.

I actually did feel sort of bad killing him, he was freaking smart for a mouse. How did he figure out to straddle the trap without setting it off? To carefully lick the peanut butter? It was crazy. He licked the peanut butter out about three times without getting caught. I would get up in the morning to find the trap still set, with no peanut butter in it and a little pile of mouse poo on either side of the trap. He must have sat there for hours carefully licking the peanut butter. It probably took me ten days to catch him, and that was with a mouse killing cat in the house. If he wasn’t such a destructive little bugger I would have gladly let him live just so I could watch him.
I’ll never forget reading on the couch one night. I see movement out of the corner of my eye. It’s him, scurrying along the baseboard. I had placed the trap against the wall so that you had to get through it to get to the hole in the garbage can. He places two feet on top of the baseboard, two feet on the floor and scurries over the trap without touching it. How could a mouse figure that out? To know that you had to be careful with the trigger of the trap so that you don’t set it off? Like I said, the whole thing was crazy. I’ve killed literally hundreds of mice over the years. He was the only smart one.