Good Sport

Okay, I have to say I think I’ve been a pretty good sport when it comes to all the adjusting that has to be done when you move to a new environment. I’ve turned my encounters with the New and Weird into light-hearted, even humorous, anecdotes about mice, monkeys, and mold. But everyone has a limit. The breaking point when you have to stop and shriek “Enough is enough! I am not laughing anymore!!” And I have reached that point.

You see, Mt. Hermon has rodents. And they are neither big-boned mice, nor feral-yet-ultimately-friendly guinea pigs (though I’ve tried valiantly to persuade myself of both those identities). No, we have rats. And I am just not okay with that. I had come to a grudging acceptance of the presence of a small mouse or two running about the house but these are fairly good-sized rats and I’m really not sure how many of them there are. Definitely more than one.

The problem first reared its ugly whiskered head on Saturday night as I was watching TV in the sunroom with Angie. I happened to glance out the door into the dining room and saw a rat skulking along the wall. This was not a pleasant sight but Angie and I temporarily rectified the situation by firmly closing the doors to the sunroom and barricading them with sticks of firewood at the bottom, lest the intruder try to sneak underneath.

I mentioned the problem to a friend on Monday and she gave me rat poison which I dutifully put out in several well-known rat haunts around the house. And the next morning, it was gone! Hooray! No more rats!

So, you can imagine my consternation when, last night as I was walking to the living room, not one but TWO of the nasty buggers went zipping across the floor of the dining room. Now, I will confess that I did get a moment of amusement out of the situation when one of the rats miscalculated and zipped headlong into the door jam with a thump. However, the amusement was fleeting while the revulsion has remained. I honestly slept really badly last night because I was very much convinced that every sound a heard was a rat making a beeline for my bed.

I will be getting more poison this afternoon. I’m hoping that one large, piggy rat ate all the initial poison and is now dead and that I just need to get a bit more to take care of his friends. I really don’t deal well with traps. And my brave male housemate has offered to bludgeon them to death with sticks whenever he sees one, but this is a) ineffectual and b) really gross so I’ll just keep putting out the poison cakes, thanks all the same. Maybe we could get a cat.