Rattus bloody Rattus

Remember I saw a great big rat in our backyard? Well, Fixit took apart the compost bin and discovered a rat's nest with 6 baby rats in it. I was a big help while this was going on, coming as close as I dared (ie. not very) to watch and then running away half-screaming half-laughing if I saw a single bit of movement. When the mother rat suddenly poked her head out of the ground and ran towards the house I freaked. Eeeek! Fixit and Nell were laughing and shaking their heads at me. Anyway. The next generation of vermin are no more, they are deceased, they are ex-rats. The mother heartlessly abandoned her babies to their fate and hid under the house. We didn't get her. But we found an old rat bait in the shed, and chucked it under the house at her.

Within days we started hearing her in our kitchen, somewhere behind the microwave. This led to a bit more of me standing nervously on a chair at a safe distance watching Fixit take all the wine glasses and crap from around that area, thinking a rat would suddenly shoot across our kitchen. But the bloody thing was safe inside the walls, and it scrabbled and gnawed away untouchably at odd times of day. Even if you banged the wall with the end of the broom, really hard, right where you thought it was, it didn't care, it just kept gnawing and scrabbling. We really hated that rat by now.

But worse was to come. Because the bastard rat must have eaten the old rat bait and decided to die inside our wall, smack in between our laundry and kitchen. Which means two rooms now stink of decaying rodent. Fixit had a good go at trying to get into the wall to locate the carcass but it was impossible.



All we can do is mask the smell. (Apparently there is a bag you can get for this problem which solves the odour problem but they are expensive and the smell will eventually go away on its own...)



In the meantime, DON'T COME TO OUR HOUSE. It is not nice.