Functionally ReTodded

I will preface this entry by saying that anyone can find themselves with pests in their homes.

No. I don’t mean pest as in Avitable naked wandering around with his big toe sticking out of a sock while he chugs that lime diet coke shit and eats double cheeseburgers.

I’m talking about nature’s pests. Here are a few that are not at all uncommon, especially in the south in the middle of a drought:

Spiders

June bugs

An occasional scorpion (one found in each of the last two houses)

Cockroaches

They’re not necessarily drawn to filth. Usually they are drawn to water. It’s a common we had a rat or six this summer to occasionally find one or more of these things in your home, especially in the summertime.

Wait. What did that say up there? There was a rat? What the fuck?!?!

My name’s FRT and we had a rat in the house. Or five. I’m not really sure. Let me go back to the beginning.

This summer, prior to having our basement finished, we noticed some signs that there may have been a tiny cute cartoon mouse type thing in our basement. So we started looking around, and we found a small hole had been chewed at one end the house where the siding and the poured basement wall met, and this was apparently the entry point.

So I put up a wire cage thingy, then sprayed that gap sealant shit in there to double protect us from another fluffy hamster from invading our basement.

But now, the issue was this: How do we humanely catch and release this mischievous little varmint in a timely manner?

“That’s easy babe,” and off I went to Home Depot for three big fucking old fashion rat traps.

I came home, got some peanut butter for bait, and went to setting out the traps where there appeared to be evidence of activity.

(Side note: While a mousetrap going off and catching your finger is almost laughable, a rat trap doing the same thing can break a finger and, short of that, can make an incredibly tough and brave father of three nearly cry like a little girl).

So I went back upstairs and reported on the locations of the traps, my bait technique and asked for some ice for my finger.

What? You think GBD was in a basement where a rat had been? Please. She was about to move out of the damn house.

So the next morning, I wake up, excited to check the traps and see if we caught the evil bastard. Down the stairs we strode, me dressed for work and she still in her pajamas and cowering behind me like the precious angel that she is.

I kissed her on the cheek, opened the basement door, and headed down to face the darkness. Well, I turned on the light, but as I turned the corner I shouted “Fuck yeah! We got him!”

She peeked around the corner and said, “We did?”

I replied in the affirmative, but then I got the willies. So I headed upstairs to fetch a trash bag and a box to put the trash bag in so I could carry the entire thing up, out and put it in the trash.

As I returned triumphantly from the trashcans outside and made a bee-line for the sink and the antibacterial soap and possibly a good old Karen Silkwood scrub down, the wife said “So did you check the other traps?”

Women. I shook my head and said “No. Why would I? We caught him already.”

We looked at each other and, trash bag and new box in hand, I headed back down the stairs.

I turned the second corner where I could see both of the remaining traps, paused, and after a second I said “Awww JESUS FUCK!”

Turns out, we had all three traps with dead rats in them.

I bagged the remaining two victims, and then took them to be with their leader. I hoped.

After a thorough scrub down, we stood in the kitchen, completely flabbergasted and horrified, and thought two things:

What if there are more?

We can’t fucking tell ANYONE!!

I hit the Depot again on the way home for more traps, baited them, put them out and went to bed.

The next morning, I found three more God damned rats, and I’m pretty sure one was about the size of a possum or a raccoon.

But the coop dee grass was yet to come. While driving somewhere with the wife, I noticed our super cool van was miss shifting into every gear. Since I don’t know anything about cars except that I like them, we took our whip to the dealer.

The next day I get a call from Mr. Goodwrench. He says that there’s trouble with a wiring harness and that they’ll have to replace it, but the warranty will cover it.

“You’re DAMNED right it will,” I said to the wife.

About an hour later, I get another call, and Mr. Goodwrench says, “The warranty will cover the part, but you’re going to have to pay for the labor.”

“And why the hell would I do that?” I asked incredulously.

“Give me your email address sir,” he said.

I sent it to him, and five minutes later I received five pictures showing where a rat or family of rats had eaten away the major wiring harness and half of the air filter and had built a sweet ass nest inside the engine compartment of our car!

GAAAAAAHHHHH!!

Next stop: call the fucking exterminator.

So a really nice guy shows up. He explains that our basement and garage are very clean and that’s not the issue. It’s food and water. The rats want it and we have it. He says that our birdfeeders have to go, as the spillage is like a siren calling the rats to within ten feet of your house, and from there it’s a matter of time.

Long story short for this part, no more rats. Although I did have the pleasant experience of having all of my golf balls fall out of the rat-chewed hole in my golf bag when it was picked up by the club guy at the swanky TPC of Piper Glen in Charlotte this fall.

So, back to the story.

We got the basement completed about six weeks ago, including purging much stuff and me going nuts organizing the storage area including sorting all stuff by holiday, games in one spot, etc.

Then about two or three weeks ago, while in the basement, I smelled something. Something dead like. Sort of like that smell of dead you get when you drive by roadkill in the summer. But not as strong.

The wife and I conferred and decided that there must have been a rat stuck inside when we sealed everything, and now he’s gone tits up and is starting to rot. “We” also decide that I should remove EVERYTHING from the storage area and search it all for the dead vermin.

Yay me.

I proceed to remove everything, search every box, bag, jar, container, and alas, I find nothing. I’m stumped.

And yet the smell lingers.

Eventually I really can’t smell it. But the wife insists she can. We borrowed my BIL’s golden retriever who, although retarded, still has a pretty good sniffer. Still nothing.

Then yesterday, My mom and step dad came into town for the night, and today, the smell was back again. It was so bad that my Step dad said, “I swear to God that I did not do THAT!”

So he, being the handy fella that he is, starts poking around downstairs.

As it turned out, the fucking sump pump for the downstairs toilet wasn’t pumping, so the gathering tank thingy was just getting fuller and fuller of human waste, all but backing up and returning to our new basement in liquid form.GAAAAAAHHHH!

Step daddy called the contractor who called the plumber who’s taking care of it as we speak.

One sentence I never thought I’d utter is this one.

Oh no. We don’t have rats in our house again. That’s just rotten shit you smell.

Have a great day everybody!