basura

They say you can really tell a lot about a person by what's in their garbage can.  Well, I've got a dead rat sitting in mine.  Yes, the critter turned out to be nothing more exciting than your standard garden variety rat.  After notifying my landlord of the strange noises I was hearing at night, he came by to patch up the hole.  He sealed it up with what everyone knows is the best defense against animals that chew voraciously, cardboard.  Yes, that's right, my landlord in his infinite wisdom sealed up the hole with steel wool and cardboard.  Not surpringingly the bored critter did away with that patch in about two seconds flat.  The unapologetic landlord came back and sealed the hole properly, warning me to make sure I put away every scrap of food at night.  Considering that the rat had been playing around in my cupboard, and not in the kitchen itself, I was a bit wary about putting things into the cupboards, and left some freshly bought apples in a dish on the counter.

The landlord's new patch indeed held, and I slept blissfully through the night for a couple of nights awoken only by the usual varmit--the kidlet.  I figured those ratones had just given up and gone somewhere else.  Ha!  One morning after hearing the familar sounds yet again (though not from the cabinet), I awoke to find my beautiful apples quite thoroughly munched, each one with several little bites taken out of it, rendering them all inedible.  (Why can't the critter just pick one and eat it?  Why must he taste a bite of each one?  If I hadn't seen this critter's corpse myself, I might have suspected the kidlet, as this behavior isn't too far off from some moves I've seen him pulling).

Anyway, by now I'm feeling quite distraught, and mad at myself, and too broke to buy more apples, and I begin again the Quest to Find the Hole.  I grab my handy dandy Buzz Lightyear Flashlight (don't laugh, it's really cool and purty, with purple and green, and it's the only one I can find since we moved) and start moving around the appliances.  Now my apartment is in a very old house, and the space I occupy wasn't always an apartment. I think it was a storage bin for bootleg hooch at one point or other, which sounds much more romantic than "basement", now doesn't it?, and so there are strange little nooks and crannies to be found, the nookiest and cranniest of which, just happens to be behind my stove.  Sure enough, by wiggling the stove just so, and shining my Buzz Light at just the right angle, I can see that there is a critter sized hole at the baseboard in the corner looking ever so much like the standard mouse hole you see in many cartoons.

Now it was time to get busy.  The woman who doesn't squish spiders was on the phone and insisting upon traps, right now, and by the next night, I came home late having dropped the kidlet at his dad's, and voila, dead rat, and me grateful I didn't have to listen to the fatal snap, or its last bit of thrashing around.  I haven't checked, and the can goes out to the curb tomorrow, but the landlord says he disposed of it in my trash, which is in accordance with King County health and safety rules.  Oh joy.  So, if you wish to analyze my personality based on what I throw out, please oh please won't you wait to do so until next week?

Comments

[Karen]

Oh Nina, you are so very very brave. I would be in therapy for a good long time if I had to face a dead rat in my kitchen.

[Cowtown Pattie]

While there is a lot more to this tale (and just as much rat), my ex and I lived in a parsonage once that had been vacant a long time. We were almost overcome by mice, and Texas sized waterbugs. The traps were full every morning, but the little buggers got more brazen by the day. One night, two of them were playing double dare the rednecked semi-boozed man sitting on the couch by openly running along the wall behind the television like a sooped up Mario Brothers game. Said man gets up, loads his old Daisy BB gun and commences to shoot them like he was in a booth at the state fair. Fortunately, for me and my pocketbook, the television was spared any random BB, and mice became yard fertilizer. And the nightly rodent shootout continued for a couple of weeks until Uncle Templeton and his hairy gang left Dodge. True story.

[Cowtown Pattie]

Or, more like the following: shootin' fish in a barrel.

[Kimberly]

I'm just so glad that it's dead and gone... and I hope it doesn't have any relatives.