The Rat Made Us Do It

Where does the time go? I thought it had been maybe three or four days since I posted. I guess I got caught up in the Olympics and everything else going on.

So the last two days, Kelly and I have been working hard at cleaning out the garage. It all started with our little visitor Alexander. Yes, we named the rat.  As I mentioned  last time, he had run into the workshop under a workbench in area piled high with bowls and buckets of odds and ends. Nuts, bolts, screws, nails, brackets, tools, supplies, doodads and thingamajigs. You name it, it was there somewhere.

We took away all the food, hoping he would leave, it didn’t work. We bought a live trap and tried to catch him that way, he triggered it, but was not in it. And he was having a wonderful time, we found droppings all over the garage. One night, he even set off the burglar alarm, as we have motion detectors in the garage and his little tiny body was apparently enough to trigger them. At 4:15am no less.

It was when we noticed a concentration of rat poo under my van’s engine area that we became concerned. Rats like to chew on things, things like wires. I can not afford to have my van’s electrical system lose it’s mind right now. I parked outside for  few days and then we tackled the problem.

It started out as moving stuff around to find Alexander, but once we stared cleaning, it felt so good that we just kept going. After an entire day in there and having cleaned 80% of it, including the most likely rat hiding places, we  still had not found him.

We started to wonder if maybe he had left without our noticing. Tired and sore, we set the live trap one more time and called it a day.

The next morning at 6am when I got up to drive my dad to his cataract surgery, there he was, scrunched up in the corner of cage, trying to make himself really small. Not a large rat, but also not a baby. He had eaten all the cheese and the peanut butter, and was anxiously waiting and wondering what was to become of him.

After my dads surgery, Kelly and I took care of Alexander. He is in a better place now. No no no, he’s not dead, he’s just in a better place. Any place is better than in my garage. 🙂 Oddly enough, I kinda miss the little fella. If I could have trained him not to chew on stuff, set off the alarm, or poo all over, than maybe we could have kept him.

Best of all,  the garage has not been this clean and organized in at least 4 or 5 years, since my dad was able to putter around in there. It took Kelly and I over 18 hours, two trips to the dump/recycling/hazardous waste depot, one trip to Habitat for Humanity re-store, and a huge load of curb side garbage. But it’s done, and it looks and feels fantastic. Such a different energy in there now.  I can’t wait to build something!

Learning Every Day: I learned that the Re-Store is open on Saturday. I learned that the transfer station has summer and winter hours. I also learned that in Canada anyway, variable rate mortgages are tied to the prime rate while fixed mortgage rates are associated with the bond rates.