My roommates and I have what you might call a laissez-faire landlady. Her name is Maria, and in two and a half years we’ve never met her. This is a typical home-improvement conversation with Maria:
    Us: We need a new dishwasher.
    Maria: What’s wrong with the one you have?
    Us: When you turn it on, the door flies open and a noxious cloud of smoke pours out and commands us to pay tribute to Zool.
    Maria: Do you think you can fix it yourselves?
    We did get a new dishwasher, but for general apartment maintenance Scott, Dave and I favor a proactive approach. When a Frost Yeti took over our freezer, we got weatherstripping and fixed the seal. When the front door fell off the hinges, we rehung it with longer screws. When the heat wasn’t working, we used the fireplace. Dave even replaced a light fixture  without electrocuting himself twice.
    So, crafty MacGyver-type that I am, I thought I’d solved our mouse problem on my own. For weeks, our apartment had been terrorized by a rodent. He was particularly fond of raiding our bread drawer. I decided enough was enough, and it was eviction time for Mickey.
    I designed a trap so devastatingly effective that I was tempted to climb into it myself: a Budweiser 12-pack box with a smudge of peanut butter at the bottom. It was out barely a day before I heard a rustling noise and turned it over to find the mouse inside. I closed the flaps and gave Mickey a one-way ride to the great outdoors. My catch-and-release skills confirmed, I declared our bread drawer once again safe for humanity and blueberry bagels.
    But I got a rude surprise the next night, when I heard a commotion in one of the pizza boxes awaiting trash day. I picked it up and made a mad dash for the door, but before I could get it outside, the unruly passenger pried open the lid and leapt to freedom, scurrying directly into Dave’s bedroom. In addition to his ragged old stuffed animals, Dave now had a real live pestilence-ridden rodent to snuggle up to at night. Obviously, my catch-and-release defense would never keep up with the mice’s mate-and-breed offense. As Dave, a medical lab technician, put it, “The one thing mice are really good at is making other mice.”
    I mulled the options. I briefly considered borrowing Dingo, one of my parents’ cats, for a week or two. Dingo is a malevolent, cross-eyed little Siamese who would like nothing better than to spend her days dismembering smaller creatures. But therein lay the problem. I knew Dingo would not be a tidy assassin, and the prospect of finding mouse parts strewn about the apartment was decidedly worse than a nibbled bagel here and there.
    Then I considered some do-it-yourself poison. A little D-Con in the breadbox, perhaps. But the problem with poison is that it rarely causes an on-the-spot demise. Mr. Mouse does not declare, “The potent poison quite o’er-crows my spirit... The rest is silence,” before expiring on the spot. More likely, the doomed vermin would drag himself into my room and die somewhere in the wall, where he would out-reek my dirty laundry for the next two weeks.
    Finally, we came to the conclusion that we could vanquish the furry invaders by cutting off their supplies. Out went the accumulated pizza boxes. Foodstuffs were placed inside or on top of the fridge. And we also plugged in an ultrasonic rodent-repeller that is inaudible to humans but is supposed to sound like a 120-decibel Kenny G concert to mice.
    After a few days, I was ready to declare victory. Not a creature was stirring, or so it seemed. I figured that Stuart Little, Chuck E. Cheese and Mighty Mouse had packed their rucksacks and headed off to start a new life.
    That was until I went to clean the broiler and found a retreating mouse heading back into the stove. I shudder to think what might’ve happened if I’d simply lit the broiler without opening it first. Mouse: It’s what’s for dinner.
    It appears we’ve got more work to do. Scott, for instance, says he recently spent the hour between 1 and 2am wearing oven mitts and his hiking headlamp, trying to capture his quarry with the colander. And I’ve been fighting mice even in my dreams, which one night caused me to snap awake and jump out of bed, landing in a combat crouch.
    So, Maria, your industrious tenants are on the case, and hiring an exterminator isn’t going to be necessary. Unless, of course, you raise the rent again next fall. In which case, we’ve also got a Frost Yeti to talk about.  *