Remember that little to-do list I needed to take care of little while back?
Basically, after one too many nights hearing little toes tapdance across the ceiling, I decided to take a look around the attic to figure out where it was coming from. I pulled the door, climbed the ladder, and found myself almost immediatley face-to-face with Ben from Willard.
The weird thing about it is that I went up those stairs with every intention of looking for a rat. It's just that the very last thing I expected was to find one, much less have it standing there basically holding the door open for me.
Undaunted, I headed out to Hell Depot to see if I could find a trap or something to kill this thing with. They had mousetraps, but all they had were these tiny little Buddy Holly airplane looking things -- nowhere near big enough to cause my friend Templeton any real harm. So I opted for chemical warfare, bought a bunch of poison packets, and headed home.
The instructions on the box said to spread three or four packets around the infested area and then wait a day or so for the poison to get eaten. After that, it said to give it one to two more days before finding and disposing of the carcasses.
The weird thing about it though is that the first time I went up there it was just something I needed to do. I skipped into the attic like it was the sort of thing I did every day for fun. This time, however, knowing that I was going to have to more or less crawl around every square inch of the place looking for what (if anything) was left of my former upstairs neighbor, I found my thoughts unexpectedly filled with a new concern:
And even if Mickey hadn't mutated into some sort of flesheating monster - it's not like I was in any real hurry to go on a treasure hunt for a decaying rat corpse. Still, the air was getting riper by the second, and who knows what kind of lovely things would show up to live in my attic if they knew dead rat had been added to the menu.
So up I went, flashlight in hand, stepping carefully over rafters and air conditioning vents, hoping to locate the body and get this whole business over with as quickly as possible.
For the record, it's one kind of shock to go into your attic and find the rat you were looking for staring back at you. But it's quite another to go looking for something that you know is there, and not be able to find anything at all.
So now I'm not only looking around the attic, but now I'm searching under and inside open spaces, secretly wondering if I'm walking into some sort of trap set by vindictive rodents.
Finally, at the far end of the ceiling I came across one of the rat poison packets, clearly chewed open and emptied of it's deadly contents. As if I needed any more proof, the packet was covered with rat poop.
Unfortunatley, it wasn't alone.
Because sitting there next to the opened packet was another little brown present left there by something that was clearly, umm...
bigger.
Basically, after one too many nights hearing little toes tapdance across the ceiling, I decided to take a look around the attic to figure out where it was coming from. I pulled the door, climbed the ladder, and found myself almost immediatley face-to-face with Ben from Willard.
The weird thing about it is that I went up those stairs with every intention of looking for a rat. It's just that the very last thing I expected was to find one, much less have it standing there basically holding the door open for me.
Undaunted, I headed out to Hell Depot to see if I could find a trap or something to kill this thing with. They had mousetraps, but all they had were these tiny little Buddy Holly airplane looking things -- nowhere near big enough to cause my friend Templeton any real harm. So I opted for chemical warfare, bought a bunch of poison packets, and headed home.
The instructions on the box said to spread three or four packets around the infested area and then wait a day or so for the poison to get eaten. After that, it said to give it one to two more days before finding and disposing of the carcasses.
For the record, that sounded like a pretty easy thingIt's only now with the delicate aroma of dead rat drifting down upon my household from above that I realize what it is that I'm actually in for.
to do when I was just reading it off the side of a box.
The weird thing about it though is that the first time I went up there it was just something I needed to do. I skipped into the attic like it was the sort of thing I did every day for fun. This time, however, knowing that I was going to have to more or less crawl around every square inch of the place looking for what (if anything) was left of my former upstairs neighbor, I found my thoughts unexpectedly filled with a new concern:
And even if Mickey hadn't mutated into some sort of flesheating monster - it's not like I was in any real hurry to go on a treasure hunt for a decaying rat corpse. Still, the air was getting riper by the second, and who knows what kind of lovely things would show up to live in my attic if they knew dead rat had been added to the menu.
So up I went, flashlight in hand, stepping carefully over rafters and air conditioning vents, hoping to locate the body and get this whole business over with as quickly as possible.
For the record, it's one kind of shock to go into your attic and find the rat you were looking for staring back at you. But it's quite another to go looking for something that you know is there, and not be able to find anything at all.
So now I'm not only looking around the attic, but now I'm searching under and inside open spaces, secretly wondering if I'm walking into some sort of trap set by vindictive rodents.
Finally, at the far end of the ceiling I came across one of the rat poison packets, clearly chewed open and emptied of it's deadly contents. As if I needed any more proof, the packet was covered with rat poop.
Unfortunatley, it wasn't alone.
Because sitting there next to the opened packet was another little brown present left there by something that was clearly, umm...
bigger.
[Listening to: Muse, "Hysteria"]
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