remorse

How long do you think it will take a rat to decompose after it's been buried?

I've been thinking I might dig it up after an appropriate amount of time and retrieve its little skull. Clean it up and polish it and put it someplace with one of my little collections.

Does that seem weird?

There is an artist that works with skulls, Jessica Joslin, and I love her work. Maybe I could send her the little rat skull to make something for me.

sculpture by Jessica Joslin

edited

the rat esta muerta

The rat is dead.  

It's time had come.

We must go to the city to start fabrication on a job and I did not want to leave with a live but poisoned rat in the walls of my house.

I sleep on the couch a lot.  It's comfortable, I like something at my back.  I like to wait til the snoring dies down before I stumble into bed.  And last night about 2 o'clock I heard the rat gnawing, not in its usual place, in the wall behind the toilet, but in the most diametrically opposed part of the house as was possible.  Which is the corner of the combo living/dining space. Where the couch is.

damn damn damn

I'm stomping on the floor, smacking the wall with the spine of a book.

stop it stop it stop it!

Oh, all the gods that are and ever were, please let this be the same fucking rat.

If you are squeamish, I recommend that you don't read any farther because I commenced to dispatch that rat the next day.

I made a trip to the store to find a pair of long handled tongs of the barbecue kind with which to grab the rat with the intent of dunking said grabbed rat into a five gallon bucket of water.

I couldn't find any.  But what they did have was a 2 tined fork with sharp pointy points on the tines.  For $1.  Not my first choice but you go with what you got.

On the drive home, I'm psyching myself up for the deed.  I can do this.  I can stab that rat and dunk him in a bucket of water.  I can do this.

So, I get home and assemble my tools.  I go retrieve the old mop handle from the small garden that I am using for a divider between the carrots and the lettuce and duct tape the handle of the barbecue fork to the end of the pole to make it a spear.  I'm having fantasies of a warrior preparing for battle against a rat asleep in it's nest.  Then I fill the 5 gallon bucket with water and cart it into the small bedroom.  I gather the screwdriver and the flashlight and the stool.  

So I have everything in the little bedroom, outside the closet.  The whole time I'm talking to the rat telling it that I'm sorry that I am the agent of its death, that its time as a rat is up and I hope that it climbs the incarnational ladder.  I am giving it a step up.

Are you praying in there, Marc calls.

Yes, I tell him.  Because that's what I'm doing I guess.  Though I am not praying to any deity but to the rat.

And so I opened the panel and tried juggling the flashlight, panel, and spear.   There was the rat in its nest waked from his sleep.  My hope was a single successful thrust through an opening about 3" x 10" at an angle...which was of course a failure.  The clothes interfered, the flashlight not aimed well, the rat evaded.

I removed clothes from the closet, I called to Marc to come hold the flashlight.

My second thrust is successful though I cannot tell exactly where I have it pinned.  I'm pretty freaked out that I have just bayoneted this rat with a barbecue fork duct taped to a broken mop handle.

If you are one of my FB connections you probably saw this:

OMG!  I just bayoneted a rat with a barbecue fork duct taped to a broken mop handle.

Now, I was afraid to try and pull it out for fear it was not well skewered and I would have to do it again.  But I did finally get it into the bucket of water and ended its misery as soon as possible.

After I cleaned out the nest, rat mummy and all, and found the hole in the sub-floor that it had gnawed next to the sewer vent, I buried it at the edge of the field.  I didn't want to throw it in the trash because it would rot and stink and I didn't want to just throw it out in the field for fear that the poison bait it had eaten would poison anything that ate it.  So, I buried it.

I stuffed the hole with steel wool and we will get some of that expanding foam to help seal it.  

I just hope I don't hear any gnawing tonight in the front corner of the house.

edit: and indeed I did not.

if I was keeping score I'd have to say the rat is winning

I'm finding my compassion for the rat is waning. The little bastard is still there!

I was gone to the city all day last Thursday so I didn't check on the rat and the progress of the poison until Friday morning.

Actually, I woke up Friday morning to the sound of the rat gnawing away inside the wall. A rude way to wake up. Thirty minutes later, the cat hacked up a hairball on my work table. An hour or so after that, we discover that rabbits had chowed down on five of the broccoli plants in the garden.

Friday was not starting out well.

I checked on the rat after breakfast and he looked nice and comfy and healthy in his nest and totally unconcerned with the flashlight shining in his face. The first hunk of poison bait had been gnawed on so I was thinking that this was the beginning of the end but I dropped another one in there for good measure and closed up the sheetrock panel.

Next on the agenda was fencing the garden. Like I didn't have anything else to do that day.

That accomplished, I worked in the dirt and compost in the little garden and got it ready to plant, finally. It was getting dark though so I didn't get it planted.

Not that I minded working out in the yard Friday as it was a beautiful day.

But back to the resident rat.

I didn't have time this morning as I needed to get to work at the antique store and I wanted to go by the farmer's market on the way, so I didn't check on him til I got home.

He was curled up happily in his nest, had pushed both bait chunks as far away as he could (although both had been gnawed on), and did not look at all like he was suffering from poisoning.

How long does it take that shit to work?

I had a long aluminum pole and I commenced to attack him with it. Poking and poking and stabbing. I know it took several direct hits but still it did not leave. Shit, I don't even know how the hell it got in there in the first place. It must have a way out.

So I closed up the panel once again to wait til tomorrow morning for the next attack.

Oh, and here's the fun part. I noticed something I hadn't noticed before, focused on the rat and all. There is a mummified rat carcass in the space next to his nest.

Nice.

I'm beginning to think I'm going to have to get a pair of long handled barbeque tongs to just grab the little bastard and drag him out.

the rat did not wander off into the sunset

I did something today that I'm not happy about. I weighed my options and really it was the only one available to me. But I didn't like it. Don't like it and wish I could have done something else.

What I did was put poison out for a rat.

Poison strikes me as a cowardly act.

You might remember last summer when I had two of my grandkids help me clean out a rat's nest in the garage. It had moved in while we were so busy with all that work earlier in the year, gone three or four days out of every week, and had gnawed holes in a glass crate that was big enough for my cat to walk through with no problem.

After we cleaned out his nest and stopped propping the garage door open and closed off his other entry hole, I thought he had left for greener pastures because he didn't seem to be around any more.

Until about a week or two ago.

When I heard gnawing in the wall behind the toilet.

On the other side of that wall is the closet in the second, smaller, bedroom, the one that Marc uses for an office. And on the back wall of that closet, which is the other side of the wall against which sits the toilet and the sink, and in the closet side of the wall is a large panel of sheet rock that unscrews to be removed to get to the plumbing if need be.

The little dogs were here for a few days while my sister was visiting her stepson and grandkids and the little male dog, Merlin, was very interested in the closet and the spot out in the Little Backyard where the pipe comes out from under the house and underground into the septic system. I finally had to close the door to the office to keep him out of there.

So, today, I got a screwdriver and a flashlight and removed that piece of sheetrock and found myself face to face with a rat who was being disturbed from its sleep. Not even close to being a mouse.

There was a 2 x 4 stud and on the other side of that stud was a small space where it had made it's nest. And it was curled up in that nest looking up at me shining the flashlight.

Looking totally not scary and confused.

Shit. Damn.

damn damn damn

Well, now what the hell am I gonna do.

I put the sheet rock back in place and went to the feed store.

My first choice would be a live trap and turn it loose in the fallow corn field. But I've tried live traps before and they don't work. At least not on mice and rats. At least not the one I tried.

So the rat has to go. It can't live in the walls of my house. It's smelly and destructive.

I don't like killing things. Not even mice and rats.

I won't use glue traps because I think those are inhumane. Anything that makes an animal chew off it's own leg to survive is unacceptable. So I generally use spring traps after the humane trap has failed four or five times, as if spring traps are humane. My hope is that they are killed instantly but I know that's not always the case.

But a humane or spring trap was not possible here without giving the rat access to the inside of the house which is also unacceptable.

I bought poison. And I opened that sheetrock panel and shined my light on that rat with it's innocent face, it was just being a rat after all, and I dropped that chunk of poisoned food right into it's nest and closed the sheetrock panel back up.

And screwed it back in place.

toady

toad lily

toadstool

toad

image via:  http://www.examiner.com

confederate rose, sunsets, rain

I have a bunch of pictures that I've been taking but haven't been posting so...

My confederate rose that volunteered last year mid-spring from the two weirdly diseased older specimens has been blooming beautifully. I have kept the two older ones cut to the ground since no one can tell me what the problem is, hopefully to prevent them from infecting the new one. Actually three volunteered but I gave two of them away.

This one has the flowers opening white and turning pink before they close at the end of the day (or the next day if the weather is cold) and although I have seen other shrubs that did that, my others never did.

Confederate roses aren't really roses. They are in the mallow family along with hibiscus, cotton, and okra.

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We have been getting some unbelievably gorgeous sunsets. The view, standing at the back of the property looking south and west over the 13 Acre Field, is one of the big reasons we bought this place.

And another.

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One of the reason for the sunsets is we are getting our fall rains. We are in a continuing drought with this year being worse than last but not as bad as the one previous to that. Even so, we have not had a hard continuous rain for a very long time. Until last Thursday. Heavy rain for half a day and if Frank's rain gauge is accurate, we got 3 1/8”.

Water in the ditch, something not seen for several years.

Water standing in the yard!

2 rag dolls and a sideshow attraction

I might have mentioned in a previous post that the three grandgirls came out for an overnighter last weekend and we worked on red yarn wigs for the twins' Halloween costumes of Raggedy Ann and how I didn't get a picture of them trying them on.

Well, it turns out I didn't get a picture but their younger sister did.

I think I also mentioned that I went in town last week so I could take the girls to the thrift center to find suitable dresses for their costumes but as it happened it didn't work out so I went by myself and picked out totally appropriate clothing except none of it fit...too small.

You think we are smaller than we actually are, Jade tells me.

So I busied myself making the aprons last Monday so Marc could deliver them when he went in to do a small job on Tuesday.

Got these pictures from their mother.

Jade had been more reluctant about the idea and decided not to wear her wig.

But Autumn totally rocks.

Robin, as always, walks her own path.