Yahoo Autos On the Vehicular Afflictions of Summer
From the December 2015 issue
The driver’s seat in my Toyota Tundra is covered in a snow-white Merino sheepskin I bought in New Zealand. Of late, I’ve been finding it peppered with black seeds. “These aren’t mouse turds, are they?” I asked my wife, who studied one of the seeds as you might study a small emerald.
“Not turds,” she flatly confirmed, putting me in a good mood until the debris returned the next morning. I placed one of the offending specks on a napkin and took it inside for further forensic servicing.
“What you’ve got there is a turd,” she stated confidently, which made me want to question her previous finding, but I let it go. “Look for a nest,” she suggested.
Between the truck’s intake manifold and the firewall was a bed of chewed foam insulation sufficiently luxurious to star in a Hilton ad. I came back from the hardware store with JT Eaton Bait Blocks, Tomcat Bait Chunx, Ramik Green Nuggets, eight trays of d-CON, a Farnam Just One Bite Bar, and four old-fashioned Victor spring traps. Also a Victor Ultimate Flea Trap, in case the mice were flinging fleas in the truck’s carpet, although it later occurred to me that it might cure their fleas, encouraging them to return for successive soothing treatments.
Twenty-four hours later, the mice had eaten two entire bowls of d-CON and had carried various rodenticidal hors d’oeuvres to all four corners of the truck. Forty-eight hours later, the same. How could a mouse family eat four bowls of d-CON and still be contentedly turdifying my sheepskin? Yet they were. So I loaded all four Victor spring traps with peanut butter and turkey bacon and a dash of salt.
C/D readers may never have learned the first useful item from any of my writing, but today is different. Here’s something you didn’t know: You can drive around town in a truck with four loaded spring traps in the footwells and never set one off. Really. I drove to the liquor store, where the clerk helped me carry out an exhaustive selection of pinot grigio. “Don’t reach inside my truck,” I warned at the curb. “Buncha animal traps in there.”
“Theft prevention?” he inquired. “You should get the kind where the horn just honks.”
The next morning, two sleek white-bellied mice had met Mickey their Maker in the copper-colored jaws of the Victor traps. The day after, two more, each the size of a Little Debbie cake oozing raspberry filling. I performed a modest dance, tossing mouse corpses between festive leaps.
That’s when I was beset by another affliction of summer—white dime-size blemishes all over my truck’s painted surfaces and glass. I drove to Sober Automotive, home of sober decisions, and a gent there told me: “What you got, bud, is Type I, II, or III evaporative water spots, mostly magnesium and calcium suspended in your well water. Try distilled white vinegar.” So I thanked this sober man, promising to give him all of my future business, and he said: “Oh, I don’t work here. I just deliver parts.”
The vinegar had no effect except to smell like I had a cat problem. Neither did paint cleaner nor rubbing alcohol nor ammonia. I watched a YouTube video suggesting a five-step clay-bar rub-out. That took me two days. It had no effect except to make the water spots much shinier. Eventually I bought seven water-spot removers, a festival of chemotherapy that should have merited an EPA permit. I stood in the truck’s bed and applied these potions to the roof, hoping no one would see the occasional damage I was inflicting with, for instance, a rubbing compound whose ingredients must have included gravel, given its ability to destroy paint. Next to each practice patch, I applied a Post-it Note enumerating the chemicals I’d applied. After a while, the skin on my fingertips flaked off.
It took forever, but most of the water spots were more or less eradicated by Meguiar’s Water Spot Remover, 3D Eraser, and Mothers California Gold Water Spot Remover for Glass. A warning on the latter said, “Exterior glass only—avoid paint and trim.” Except it worked so well on paint and trim, especially on the plastic grille, that I had little left for actual glass, which was fine, because it was totally ineffective on glass.
Then I ordered a CR Spotless Water Systems DIC-20 ($450), which attaches via stainless braided hose to your outdoor spigot and, via two 20-inch filters that you’d expect to find on a Disney cruise liner, purifies water so exhaustively that it could be used for satisfying medical experiments on garage mice. After the purifier arrived, a nice person named Kelly emailed, asking if my truck was “shinny.”
“Shinny and turdless,” I responded.
Then my barber, Hope, advised, “Once every two weeks, dismantle your jockey box and drag out the remaining dead rodents.” A “jockey box,” she told me, is a glove box. So. You’ve learned a second bait-chunk of wisdom. That’s all I’ve got.
Last week, Phillips revealed a second infestation. He’s in counseling. Again—Ed.
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