Unwelcome House Guests

Maybe it's the new room addition, but several different creatures suddenly want to move in with us.

First, the mouse. After weeks of ocassionally seeing it scamper around the house (or encountering the mouse poop left in its wake), we got aggressive. But nothing worked -- glue traps, fancy new mouse traps -- until we busted out the old-fashioned spring trap. Sure enough, the next day, problem solved.

Well, sorta. It appears that there may be more than one. And the second one is taunting us, licking peanut butter off the traps, but so far managing to avoid getting stuck in one. Damn clever mice.

Meanwhile, I've gotten a little more nervous wandering into our backyard at night. I've now spotted the neighborhood skunk twice, but so far have managed to avoid getting sprayed. My luck has got to run out sometime, right? Skunks are so common in our area that you'll remember a now-defunct blogger even dubbed their site The Skunks of Los Feliz.

Have any of you dealt with an unwanted neighbor of the skunk variety? And how do you send the message that their visits aren't really welcome?

(Pic via Flickr and Dan Kaiser).