Our First Houseguest

After you've finally got everything unpacked- the office is all setup, dishes are in the cupboards, toothbrushes are in a little jar next to the sink, the utility room has all the boxes of extra stuff packed away that you won't see until the next move; you get that first night that you can just hang out and relax. We ended up spending that night reading. The interior of the new place is so relaxing and nice. It's very western in style and if I had one adjective for it, I would say it was 'clean'. So it was such a peculiar moment in my life when I looked up over the rim of my book and made eye contact with a 12" rat that just sauntered into the bedroom. Moments later, it reversed itself as Pui started squealing. So now I'm in the position of having to deal with a rat problem. I hate new houses.

So I go to the super store and go to the rodent ailse. For some god awful Buddhist reason there are no hinge-swinging rat traps. All they have is these 14" pizza plates with this special rat glue. You basically put some bait in the center, the rat goes for it and wallaa, you've caught yourself a rat.

What the box doesn't tell you (but of course you know it's going to happen), you don't just catch yourself a rat, you catch yourself a live rat. So now I have to figure out how to kill this huge thing. Pui (being the sweet little Buddhist that she is) wanted me to try and get the thing out of the trap (outside of course) and see if it could get away. After just about putting a broom handle through his stomach, I was able to dislodge him; only to have him get helplessly stuck to the broom. There was no way this thing would ever walk again. So I'm like, o.k., I'll put the end of the broom under the water in the canal behind our house, come back five minutes later and deal with it. Only the thing that happened was that 5 minutes later that little bastard somehow crawled up the broom handle 2 feet to get it's nose about 1" out of the water. At this point we figured this thing could probably survive anything, so I kindly scraped him off the broom onto my neighbors fence and waved a unfond farewell. That would suck so bad if my neighbors read this.