Mice.

This is a followup to an offhand comment I made at the end of last year.  We never posted about our experience, and while there are no pictures, the story itself has some interesting elements.

The something that seemed like it was trying to get in through the air conditioning unit turned out to be multiple somethings.  We were pretty sure there were mice or vermin of some sort living in our ceiling.  We could hear them scratching and running about at night, and one night it was so bad we thought they were going to scratch through the bedroom ceiling and fall squealing onto our faces, so moved into another room to sleep.  Of course, the vermin were living above the bedroom, most likely because that was the one room that was heated most days.

We had our official helper Mieko call the real estate company to let them know something was going on.  At first, they didn't believe us.  A lot of "Is it still there?" and "Are you sure?" ensued.  It took a bit for them to agree to send someone in to take a look to see if there were mice, because of course, they can't send in someone to exterminate until they're sure that there is a problem, and understand what the problem is.  We first were concerned December 21, a couple of days after the noises started because they didn't stop.

We were finally able to get them to send someone on January 9, though part of that was because everything shuts down for a bit around Christmas and New Year's Day, so there was a bit of a backlog.  I just wanted to get a cat/borrow someone's cat for a bit, but Lee vetoed that one.  A man came by, went up into the ceiling (incidentally, to get into the ceiling requires putting a big stepladder up in our shower), and looked around.  He took a picture on his phone of what was up there to show us and to have as proof that something was going on.  Yes, it was mice.  They were shocked.  I thought - is it so hard to believe that we said that we heard multiple little things running around in the ceiling and were not making it up?

Now that they believed us, we scheduled two further appointments for the exterminator to come by, one for him to set out poison and sticky traps, one for him to clean up the sticky traps and make sure there were no more traces of mice.  January 29, we had the all-clear, no more evidence of mice.  Hopefully we won't have the same problem this winter!