Of Mice and Men and Mothballs

This week, I may have just made the stupidest decision of my life.

By the end of this story, you might feel sorry for me. You will certainly laugh your ass off.

But the chaos started a couple weeks ago.

I was driving to work, freezing cold outside, defrost roaring inside, when suddenly to my shock, I literally watched a crack grow across my windshield. We actually already had a crack on our windshield, but it wasn’t in the line of sight, so it passed PA inspections (ugh… inspections). Now with two, probably not.

The next week, we called Comcast (twice) because it seemed like our cable was going out. It wasn’t – it was just our third TV to die in about four months. Then Amber scraped a pole in a parking garage with our brand new 2009 Civic (not the one with the cracked windshield). I once read Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy, where he wrote that he and his wife always purposefully dented their new cars to quickly remind themselves about not to put their love in temporal items. Needless to say, I didn’t take it as well—but I couldn’t be too harsh given the two parking tickets I got in January…

Sunday night (this week) we were awoken around 2 am to the sound of a rodent (we thought it was a mouse but it could be a squirrel) chewing on something in the wall of our bedroom. I was disturbed for a second, and given that I’m deaf in one ear, was able to put my good ear on the pillow and pretend it wasn’t happening. Amber was not too happy about my apathetic response and promptly nudged me and asked what I was going to do about it. I didn’t do anything, hoping the little critter would just go away.

Monday, we dragged our gigantic tube TV across the floor to make our way down the basement stairs, into the car, and on to the TV recycling center. When we took it into the kitchen, it completely destroyed our already cracked threshold.

Monday night, I was awoken again to the sound of a critter, this time above our ceiling. Clearly, he was not going away and he was finding a way into our attic. Amber woke up, heard the noise, and started looking up what to do to get rid of mice in your attic. She spouted off a list of things I would have to go purchase at Home Depot (once I shoveled the four inches of fresh snow off the driveway) in the morning: De-Con, the plug-ins that supposedly send off a signal mice don’t like, and mothballs. Yes, according to many websites, mothballs will rid you of your pests.

Tuesday night, I went up into the attic and threw mothballs throughout the attic – often purposely throwing at the far reaches of the attic and even down the sides into our walls where the little critter sounds had come from. I had been a successfully good husband.

I should have done more homework first.

No less than thirty minutes later, the entire house smelled of mothballs. So, yes, many people use mothballs as a deterrent for mice because they hate the smell. It is also a deterrent for humans. The smell is only the half of it. Mothballs kill moths and larvae. How? By suffocation. They are gassed to death. According to other websites, mothballs can also kill humans.

At this point, Amber asked me how I placed the mothballs and told me I should go get them out of the attic. I explained to that that was an impossible feat. Mothballs are white and the size of marbles. Insulation is slightly pinkish but basically looks white, especially in poor lighting. This is a needle in a haystack kind of thing.

After refusing to respond to her determined request for two hours, at 11pm, I read up on mothballs on the internet and freaked out. They are very dangerous little things. As this one guy writes, they are evil. In fact, I discovered on the internet that there were other not so informed deter the mice homeowners who had made the same mistake as I. One threw four boxes of mothballs into his attic and finally he and his family moved into his mother’s house for a month. Thankfully, I thought, I had only thrown around ¾ of a box.

So, we set up an air mattress downstairs and over our silently sleeping two year-old—and I rigged our box fan into the vent in the attic to increase circulation. I slept on the couch. I did not sleep for long. At 4:30, I woke up and could not fall back asleep, fearing for our lives and running through the mind the fact that I had dumbly put my family in a gas trap.

At 6AM, I drove to Home Depot and bought a number of items to clear out the attic. Then, I emailed my boss to tell her I wouldn’t be in for work, and rounded it out with a quick email plea for help to some of my friends. Then, up I went into the attic from where I would not return for a long while.

There was no way to remove the mothballs without removing the insulation. This is not rolled insulation. It is blown-in, which means it is chopped up into a trillion pieces and looks like an enormous pillow fight explosion. This was, indeed, insulation I and a friend had installed a few months before (thanks Kylie).

From 7-9, I gathered insulation into trash bags by myself. Then my friend, Ben, came over and helped while Amber watched E and their two year-old (she and E are only four days apart) for an hour and a half until Amber had to leave for work (at which time, Ben would have to stop helping to watch E). I dropped Ben off, I went back to work.

At 11:45 I got a call from my friend Sean, who was free and coming over. Hallelujah. I stopped for a brief lunch. I tried heating up my food in the microwave, and it sparked like mad – as it did last night. Our microwave has also died.

I ate my homemade mac and cheese cold. It was gross. But it was homemade.

We worked, gathering insulation in trash bags and discovering moth balls as if they were buried gold nuggets until 4:30. 75 trash bags later, we had cleared out the attic (now I have a garage fully of trash bags), and we had 30 confirmed mothball sightings. I had been in my attic for nearly 10 hours, all day long thinking, “If this is the dumbest thing I do in my life, I should be proud… No I’ll never live this one down.” My body hurts.

We’ve also gathered up all the odor eliminator products we could find. I have a pile of charcoal and some lava rocks in the attic. Amber placed out some old containers of baking soda and fennel seed. And I must say, after leaving the windows open all day and doing all that we did, we have smelled a remarkable improvement. Now, we have a very smelly garage… But alas, there are still mothballs in our walls that we cannot get out so we’re not quite sure how well we solved the problem.

After all this, I had to go teach a college course from 6-8:30p.m. After cleaning up from the mess, and showering, fifteen minutes later, I met up with a babysitter who would watch E before Amber got home for just a hour. I then drove downtown and hit an onslaught of traffic due to a Pittsburgh Penguins game and had to park a mile away.

We slept again on an air mattress downstairs. I can’t remember the last time my body felt this sore. By Thursday morning, Amber was paranoid that she was getting sick from the smell—even though I taped up the door to the garage, the smell of mothballs knocked me over when I opened the door to the basement. I had planned to wait to move the trash bags of insulation to a friend’s shed—the very friend who helped me blow in the insulation in the first place!—until Saturday, but it couldn’t wait. I moved all the bags outside, and we opened the windows to our house for the rest of the day (it was 40 degrees today). After a few hours, Amber came home and said the house smelled fine, but once she turned on the heater the smell started to come back, albeit faintly.

So, as a precautionary measure, we are sleeping somewhere else tonight and staying away from the house for another day. Hopefully by the weekend this little trip through Purgatory will be over.

Lessons learned:
- The internet tells the truth, just not always the whole truth on the same webpage.
- Moth balls are a strong deterrent for many animals… and for people too.
- Always read the label.
- I have a new appreciation for the term, “fuming.”

P.S. – We still have a critter in our attic.