When Ratty Comes Marching Home Again

Grandparents are rat magnets. At least, that is the conclusion I am rapidly coming to. As faithful readers no doubt recall, we had rat problems when my in-laws last visited (crisis, climax, ambiguous conclusion).

Anyway, back to the present: my mother is visiting and we have another rat to contend with. We saw evidence about a week ago but we set out some poison in a child-inaccessible location and the rat consumed a lot of it. We assumed it was dead, but today we saw its tail while preparing lunch.

We were minding our own business when my mother noticed a humongous rat tail sticking out from beneath the dishwasher. It was larger than a very large worm and smaller than a small snake. Probably about 7 inches long. Assuming it wasn’t mooning us I’ll assume a tail length of around 8 or 9 inches total.

Paula is less than pleased. I think she views it as a personal insult to her homemaking skills. I prefer to think of it as part of a larger ecological issue involving our apartment complex, the weather, and the impossibility of creating a hermetically sealed apartment.

But Paula is on the warpath. To delve further into cliche, it’s on.

updated 11/7/2005 to soothe the savage beast that is family

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