rats

Hey ladies so I had an awesome day yesterday. Would you like to hear about it? First, a dear friend dumped me. Second, I dumped* my not-boyfriend. Third, I watched a rat walk from my sink to my dishwasher, and then disappear up into the latter. God is great!

No more about the first two, more about the last. I was composing an emotionally exhausting email around 1 a.m. last night when I heard some scuffling, rattling sounds from outside my bedroom door. The neighbors upstairs? Next door? Someone in the hallway? When I opened the door to investigate, the scuffling reached a pitch and then abruptly died down. A few minutes later I saw a gray Norway rat the size of a tall boy not walking but strutting through my kitchen.

(Okay, so this is not a Norway rat. But God might have left some naked mole rats for me too, you don't know.)

I gasped, howled, and slammed the door, then suppressed the urge to scream/cry/shake Olympia awake. When I regained my courage, I grasped the Swiffer in my right hand and a broom in my left, and used both to jab at the dishwasher. I could hear the rat rattling around in the dishwasher baskets.

I didn't want to tackle this problem in the middle of the night, so I shut my bedroom door, stuffed towels under the door to block out the rats, then put in earplugs and then searched cat postings on Craigslist, but none looked suitably agile. Then I slept and had nightmares for six hours about rats. In between these nightmares, I had a relatively pleasant dream that the rat I had seen was actually a mother possum, and there was a family of possums dangling by their tails from my dishwasher rack. Somehow the thought of family values comforted me.

In the morning, I investigated. So there are some structural problems in my apartment that have allowed rats to access my kitchen. First, there are a number of 2'x1' holes in the cupboard behind the sink.

When I told the exterminator this, she said, "We can't help you. You need a carpenter." Anyway, I had to cancel my exterminator appointment because my landlord called me up in a fury, told me to read my lease, and informed me that he had a contractual right to try to cure the problems in the unit himself before I resorted to self-help. I looked, and indeed this was in the lease.

There are also numerous other holes around the rest of the cupboard unit, and the dishwasher is missing some sort of panel that prevents rats from using it as an buffet line between my oatmeal and my bread. Oh yeah:

it gnawed a hole in my oatmeal container, and then managed to get to the other side of the kitchen, up to a 3' high countertop, where it chewed through the bottom of a bread bag and ate half of four slices of oat-nut bread. I only found out about the latter when I attempted to make myself a sandwich and instead found four messily chewed-up slices.

Holy fucking shit ladies, this means that my tall boy-sized rat friend fattened itself up to the size of a Jack Russell terrier on my bread and staggered its fat little yeast-drunk ass back into its warren last night. I was so horrified when I reached through the hole in the bottom of the bread bag that I immediately dumped it into the garbage without pausing to take a photo. The rat also left little half baby finger-sized turds behind.

My landlord arrived two hours later than he said he would, with one of his 80 year-old Polish slaves in tow. He keeps two to seven Polish workers penned in one of the basement apartments and calls upon them whenever he needs sloppy work done in an unworkmanlike fashion. This man then spent two hours shaping three pieces of plywood into a miniature Stonehenge (like the letter π). He would enter my apartment and track dog poop and dust everywhere, hold up Stonehenge, curse, leave the apartment and saw or grind it on a power tool outside, and then return and repeat the process. If you look at the hole above, it is hard to see how a Stonehenge-shaped plywood structure would really improve the situation. After two hours of this, the man had a coughing fit, said something in Polish, gathered up his tools, and left, having done almost nothing. (All of the holes remained.)

So it was time to do some self-help. I ventured through the rain to Ace Hardware, where a friendly salesman with a Mike Ditka Chicago accent convinced me to buy steel wool, spackling, plaster grid tape, plaster reinforcing plates, poison pellets ("Peanut Butter Flavor!"), and a rat trap the size of my face. This thing looks like it could just snap all the fingers off all the infants in the world, all at once!

When I got home, I put on my rat protection outfit for courage, because I knew I could not crawl underneath the sink otherwise. This consisted of (1) jeans, (2) a long sleeve shirt, (3) a denim jacket, (4) hiking boots, (5) heavy duty rubber gloves, (6) a balaclava, (7) ski goggles, and (8) a headlamp.

Later I got hot and ditched the goggles and swapped out the balaclava for the extra heavy duty valve-filter facemask that my dad stuffed into my carry-on bag for protection against H1N1 flu (which he pronounced "heenee"). This was also the same model of facemask he mailed me in 2003 during SARS. No sense in getting hantavirus except that several times I rubbed my eyes and nose and OH MY GOD THEY ARE MUCUS MEMBRANES!!!

Then I spent a few hours sweating, cursing, hammering, drilling, hurting myself, and spreading debris all over my kitchen. The Polish worker had left behind a piece of plywood, and I used leftover brackets from a shelving project to fashion it into a makeshift barricade for the lower portion of the dishwasher. Now the dishwasher doesn't open all the way and I have drilled holes into the floorboards, but who gives a shit, tenant's right to self-help. I taped and spackled the smaller holes in the cupboards and then used another bracket to reduce the gap between the cupboard and one of its walls from 4" to 1.5", and then stuffed the remaining gap with steel wool.

In the process, I bumped some of the pipes under the sink, and they started leaking. So now in addition to having rats, I have a slow leak under my sink, right in time for floorboard-rotting and mosquito seasons.

(Scenes from my home improvement odyssey.)

I also spent a few frantic hours throwing away vulnerable-looking food or finding secure places to stash it.

My landlord came hours later (after I had called to say that his worker left in a coughing fit and never came back) announcing his plan. It would not be enough, he declared, to simply plug up the holes in the apartment and keep rats out. First, we would have to catch the rat, in the apartment. Then he triumphantly revealed the solution: two hubcap-sized glue traps.

I surrendered my peanut butter to his stupid fucking idea, vowing to seal the holes in my apartment with steel wool, broken glass, poison pills, and duct tape after he left because I sure as hell was not going to break the spine of or drown in a plastic bag in soapy water a gummed up rabid half-alive rat clawing to be free. Also, the pipes are fucking leaking, so the glue traps got saturated anyway in a few minutes and are now worthless.

So. Now it is approaching the hour when rats run free. Soon I will retreat to my room, block the door, and drown out the scratching noises from the kitchen with Pandora. I will post an update if there is one. Courage, Mom.

* So haven't exactly broken up with Harry even though I keep vowing to do so. I have bored too many people with the issues involved to say much here except that they are basic life-goal questions such as "Do I need scintillating conversation or just love?" and "Is there sense in enjoying the short term if there is no long term?" etc. Blah blah.