Tag Archive | rats

I Hired a Rat Catcher

Jul17

I threw in the towel on the rat catching after I was awakened at 3:45 AM by a terrible racket under my bed. It was so loud I thought it was in my room, but when I turned on the lights, I could see it wasn’t. The scrabbling went on and on, so I finally had to move into the guest bedroom. In the morning I decided to finally rid the house of this dirty rat, or rats.

A.I. gave me all the instructions. Bait a rat trap but don’t set it. Let the rat eat the peanut butter all it wants for several days until it feels totally comfortable and then set the trap. It all made perfect sense except for the instructions as to where to put these traps. I decided I needed a professional so called a company called BugMaster.

A very nice woman named Chantal came and immediately found the grease trail the rats had left so she saw exactly where they were coming in. She then checked the perimeter of the house and showed me areas where they could get in and told me what to do. Then she did as A.I. said, she baited two traps and said for me to set them in a few days.

I do hope to God the traps work as I hate living with rats. I’ve also had it with the ants as yesterday my dining room lights wouldn’t work. I called the electrician and he said he’s never seen anything like it. As soon as he began unscrewing the light switch ants came pouring out. The ants also break my air conditioner every couple of years by living in the connection box.

As you may know by now Calvin’s sweet orange tabby cat Felix never came home again, presumably eaten by coyotes which live next door in the field. A neighbour said her cat was bitten by one right in front of her and then died.

For the last two weeks a raccoon has been breaking into the chicken run, and it’s killed two of my hens, Jennifer and Heather. And the awful thing about raccoons is they only tear the crop out of the hen, leaving the entire rest of the bird. What a waste of lovely chicken. As the garbage truck had just gone, I had to bag the hens and put their carcasses in the freezer until this week.

I hired my neighbour to top the chicken run with wire, so now it might be somewhat harder for that raccoon to bust in. I’d like to complete the job with a line of electrical wiring across the top but doubt that’s possible as when I explained that to the electrician, he was puzzled and asked, “what kind of a wire are you thinking of?” This gave me the hint either he’s not the man for this, or that I’ve once again asked for something completely insane.

Sure, I find it interesting to live as though I’m a pioneer breaking trails and slashing the forest to make a clearing and build a home. However, I live a ten-minute drive from downtown Kelowna so sometimes find it a bit overwhelming to have to shop for services or products that will protect me from wild critters.

The nice woman from BugMaster said getting rid of the ants will be around $500 this fall and the same again in the spring, so on top of annoyance there are large costs associated with pest removal. But what can ya do? I can’t leave the ants and rats to completely destroy my house.

Well never mind, I’m finally doing something about it all, so I have to cut myself some slack.

Sneaky Yoga

Jul3

It’d be wonderful to be able to say one had been injured falling from a bike, riding a horse, water skiing, but no, my back is wrecked thanks to yoga. I’ve been alternating weights one day, yoga the next so imagine my surprise to find it was the yoga that injured me.  So simple, just kneel, put your left leg forward into a lunge, raise your right arm and bring it to the outside of the left knee and look toward the back corner of the mat. Just a simple twist, but for some reason, my body balked.

I’m taking advantage of it by doing even less than I would normally do, physically that is. I still have to work on my kids book as I want to complete the third by the end of this summer. Then I’ll have a nice little series of three featuring the dachshunds as the neighbourhood crime watch. You’ll be absolutely stunned when you see the illustrations an artist is doing for them.

It’s kind of insulting the way the dogs act when I clean or put on makeup. It’s like I never do these things, so when I do they think something’s up. And I suppose it must be true, as dogs are creatures of habit. When I put on makeup, I’m generally going out, or else someone’s coming. I always clean before a guest comes due to the mountains of cat and dog fur everywhere, so it makes sense.

But when I’m just at home, deciding to clean for the hell of it, no-one coming, I do feel the sting of the dogs’ quiet judgement. Alright, already, I’ll vacuum and dust more frequently if that’s what you’re on about.

Remember Joan Rivers’ old joke? You vacuum, make the beds, clean the bathroom, do the dishes, and why? Six months later you have to do it all over again.

Yesterday I made a very poor-quality roast for Calvin, Visini and their guest Dominic from Hungary. I stupidly decided I’d try something different and make a medium rare kind of roast, whereas I’m really best at the well-cooked pot roasts and stews. And of course it was tough as shoe leather, though I’d prepared for that with an immense number of fatty sides.

I’d also made my four-layer chocolate cake and distributed large pieces topped with ice cream. All of that seemed to take their minds of the dreck roast. I said to Visini the next time I say to you I’m going to experiment with something new, stop me.

Here’s something absolutely disgusting and terrifying: Calvin saw a very large rat in the storage room downstairs. About a month ago when Sylvie came to feed the cats as we were away, she said she heard a scrabbling sound. I said probably some half-beaten animal the cats dragged in. But no, it’s a healthy rat, enjoying all the Purina Cat Chow it can hold.

I wondered why I would have 7 empty cans of cat food in a day and now I know why. I’m terribly disappointed in the cats for not killing it and its kin, of which I imagine there are many given the endless supply of food. I’ve now removed all cat food and will get a few nice big strong rat traps and hope to Jesus I rid the house of them. Can you imagine?

By the next time I write, I will have celebrated the first birthday of my life without my mom. I had 71 of them with her, so that’s quite an extraordinary number. Mom being the kind of person she was, she always held large outside galas on her deck in the Osoyoos heat. This year I’ll be busy setting rat traps instead and that’s fine, too.

You Have to Love Pets

Jul24

I had a rodent-filled couple of days thanks to the tuxedo cats. A few nights ago, I heard one of the cats coming into the house through the pet door, making their distinctive very loud meowing that denotes they have prey. I got up and closed my bedroom door and got back into bed. As I was trying to get back to sleep, I heard Frieda fooling around, her nails clicking on the wood floor, and so I got up grabbed the dog, gave her a couple of slaps and threw her into her bed.

Frieda then remained a good dog in her bed until I woke up, giving both dogs permission to leave their beds, and as soon as they did, they started mad hunting behaviours in my room. Being dachshunds, they hate to waste energy on nonsense so when that hunting instinct hits, I know there’s a rodent nearby. I moved a piece of furniture, and a mouse ran out.

I screamed at the dogs, “over here, over here”, but by then the mouse had leapt into the drawer of my night table. I opened it for the dogs, but once again the wily mouse ran out and got into my closet. Frieda then spent the next three hours looking up, so I tried to lift her up high to see if she could get it, and I shook my clothes, thinking maybe it was hiding there, but nothing.

The next day I noticed something pink on my closet floor and peering closely I saw it was a baby mouse. Then I saw two more of them scattered about. I guess that was a pregnant rodent? No further sign of the mother, but I had to deal with the most disgusting hairless miscreants. Barf!

The following morning when we got up the dogs did the barking, scratching, panting at the chest of drawers in the entrance hall, so once again, I thought here we go, another mouse. I moved a corner and suddenly a rat ran out of the other end. I screamed at Louie “Sic Sic Sic!” and at that moment Louie turned, and the rat ran right into him whereby he shook it and bam, dead rat.

I just got back from Osoyoos where it was Frieda’s turn to vomit all over the place. Two weeks ago it was Louie, but this time it was Frieda. She’d spent hours scratching under the peach trees looking for mice so perhaps had found some and ate one that’d gone bad. You know a rogue mouse. First, she threw up in the night on the newly washed bedspread from the puke-out of Louie’s two weeks earlier.

Then all day yesterday she continued to throw up every few hours, and curiously only liked to do it on mom’s Persian area carpets. These aren’t the kind I would buy, you know the $300 jobs made from polyester, but the properly woven variety that cost thousands of dollars. Oopsies.

Have you heard of Folex carpet cleaner? It really works. I spent quite a lot of time with it yesterday and this morning, and can vouch for it being largely successful, though I have to say bile is a killer. Let’s just say we’ll always remember this visit when we look at those carpets.

It’s a good thing mom’s as far gone as she is, as those carpets were her pride and joy. But she’s now largely returning to babyhood, where she eats and naps, eats and naps. She says hilarious things like “I went downstairs to check on the furnace” to which I reply, “No, you didn’t.” She says, “But how do you know that I didn’t?” and I reply, “Because you can’t even stand up to walk from here to the bathroom.”

So between the pets and mom, not to mention Luke, there’s always some form of nerve erosion going on.