It’s the year of the Rat, according to the Chinese zodiac. It’s the year of the Rat in my house, literally.
Early in the year, as Chinese New Year was approaching, we saw a rat scampering about our home. Set the rat trap, caught it after a couple of days, and was taken care of. (Don’t ask me how it was taken care of, or the animal lovers will be at my throat, even though this is a probable-disease-carrying rodent we’re talking about. Anyway, I didn’t take care of it, so I have no say on how it was to be taken care of, so there.)
Then we have another rat in the house. Maybe it’s a reincarnate of the first rat, because this one is more aggressive and smarter than its predecessor. It managed to wreak havoc in my bathroom – shitting all over the place and knocking over the toiletries, get caught in the rat trap (I swear it was caught, M saw it in the trap and she made me go see it) and in the next moment, escaped from the trap.
We didn’t see or sense its presence anymore after that, so I assumed that it found its way out of our home. I started to leave my room door open (because the last time I did that when there’s a rat in the house, it went into my room and I went to bed with the door closed with the rat with me, OMFG my skin is crawling remembering that time) and stopped being paranoid.
Today, today… I was minding my own business, checking my blog at six in the morning (I know, I’m crazy, I love my blog, sue me!) when a fuckingasshuge rat charged towards me. I screamed blue murder, at six in the morning, when everything was still quiet and life hadn’t really begun yet. Not that it forced the rat to change directions. It went under my chair (luckily I had my feet up on the chair!!) and under the shelf next to my computer table.
Is the fucking rat stupid or what??? Why would it go towards the direction of a human, and also where the source of light was coming from?! And there was no food anywhere near me!!
I sat frozen on my chair. I wanted to leave, but I wanted to stay at the computer. Then I remembered my room’s opened door. I scurried upstairs to close it, then I went down again. I was hoping that it might have run off to hide somewhere else in the house so I could continue with my blogging activities.
I stood at the staircase, staring at my computer and where I think the rat was. Good thing I didn’t go back, because a couple of minutes later, the rat surfaced from its hiding place. I shrieked again, and it saw me and stood where it was. I shrieked again (I tell you, I’m not a screamer but man, rats just freak me out, especially one that charges toward your direction for no goddamn apparent reason. It’s a tribute to my primitive ancestors, my animalistic shriek.) and it hid behind the table where my CPU is.
That was it. I ran back to my room and hid until M came back from her morning exercise.
I’m traumatised!!! 😥
*
Got tagged by MarG to write about my life in six words. Crazy! Anyway, here’s my attempt to write about my whole life thus far in 6 words:
Eat, sleep, shit, read, sweat, love.
Yeah, mind-blowing. I know. 😉
bloggerdygook 
Comments on: "Rats!!!" (18)
A family of rats once invaded our old house. I was around 9 or 10 then and it used to be great fun watching the rats. The rest of my family felt differently though. They were ultimately poisoned and thrown out. *sigh*
sulz: when you have your own house, i’ll be sure to inform all the rats that pass my way to make it to yours! 😛
Rats. They give me the heebyjeebees. Ratatouille they are not.
sulz: indeed, indeed!
Aww I don’t mind rats. Or mice, or lizards, or spiders.
Just worms.
sulz: we could live together; i’ll make you the official pests and rodents relocator.
Oh my, rats? I’ve had mice before in our college house and that freaked me out enough. Had to call the exterminator right away when I found their shit all over the place. It was like they infested over night.
Cursed varmints!!!! 🙂
sulz: aye, curse them! *shakes fist in agreement* you know, i always wondered how exterminators find pests and rodents. i think this one has been living in our house for over a month already!
If the rats are making themselves visible there is probably many of them close and there probably is not food available without exposing themselves. I used to work at at grain elevator and we had some huge rats under our grain bins. Some were bigger than cats. You never saw them out in the open but they were fairly fearless underneath the elevator and rarely ran when we went underneath to work.
sulz: yeah but we’re not going to put food for them so they won’t show themselves to us! what we want is for them to be gone. forever. 👿 muahaha!
I can’t believe someone else has also been traumatized by rats. There was a time when my grandparents were away and I was alone at home. Somehow two rats got in the house and also reproduced dozens. I could not sleep at night because their army would come out in darkness and make strange sound under my bed. I feared a rat would one day jump on my face. I would cover myself fully in bedsheet. Then I tried sleeping with lights on. I called Pest Control of India (PCI) and was willing to pay them 2k to get rid of rats. Got help from neighbours to setup traps, caught only young uns. 🙂
It was really hard how I finally got rid of all the rats from house.
Too many rat experiences you are getting to reda here.
sulz: 😕 that sounds much much worse than my encounter! i would have screamed the house down if there were that many rats in my house! oh, that was nasty for you… thank goodness you managed to get rid of them in the end!
So, you don’t see rats coming to live with you as good luck in the year of the rat? Just read the zodiac—they have so many good qualities! 😉 I had a mouse that ate the rug once. That was very unpleasant. Is it particularly humid right now? Sometimes they like to come inside then. I wish for you a rat-less house. 🙂
sulz: haha, ironic then, because as an ox myself, i’m supposed to be compatible with rat people. and i just can’t stand real rats! 😛 it’s actually raining the past couple of days. we thought that it might be due to a construction going on in the house behind ours. the rats must be disturbed and found other sources of food, namely our home. 😕
thanks for the wish, i fervently hope for it to come true!!
haha…oh wait. it’s no laughing matter. the rat kawaii or not? maybe that ‘fuckingasshuge rat’ is a prodigious chef trapped in a rat’s body? maybe it is trying to say hi?
sulz: ratatouille it is definitely not!! urgh, my skin is crawling at the memory of our meeting.
Ugh, rats! I don’t like them much either. We used to live in a ground floor apartment for a couple of years; it was right next to a small park and we used to have a big problem with rats at night. The neighbours kept leaving food out for the birds, which the rats would eat… you could hear them scurrying about for hours, and finally one of them found a way into the space between the walls of our flat.
It never got inside but it ended up being stuck there. For days we could hear it running around but it never got out. In the end it died there, but that wasn’t the worst of it. About a week later there was this awful stench as the body started to decompose… and then these gigantic blowflies came pouring through the air vents! It ended up feeling like something from a Stephen King novel.
We moved not long after that. But I still don’t like rats! So I hope you get rid of them all. Maybe keep a baseball bat near you, sulz? You never know, it might come in handy! 🙂
sulz: urgh! what an awful ratty tale. 😛 haha, you didn’t move because of the rats, did you? sigh, i don’t know how we’ll get rid of it, since the rat trap doesn’t work for it… and trust me, i could have a sword with me and it’ll be useless because i’m too freaking scared to go anywhere near it!!
Rats are survivors and wherever there are humans you will find rats. Their teeth grow back and pretty much enable them to go anywhere. They can gnaw through concrete given enough time. The thing is they are like cockroaches – they are prolific at reproduction and when you see one that means there is a heavy population close.
sulz: oh man, no wonder! i think there’s a nest of roaches in my house. 👿 thankfully they only appear whenever me dad is around. 😛 urgh, i need to move out of this pest-infested home! haha.
I was playng a game called SiN earlier. I was pissed off because I was lost in a deserted subway and was busy killing hobos and I uh… got attacked by a bunch of rats and um… died. Stupid fucking hobos. Stupid fucking rats. Stupid fucking game.
sulz: don’t get mad, get even! play it again and kill those bleeding rats. show no mercy!!! 😀
Rats??? have not seen them since ages. 🙂
And I know I am very lucky. Indeed. 🙂
Actually, we have a lot of stray cats in our locality, so they keep the rats at bay. Simple.
sulz: we have cats in the alley too, they were just yowling amorously yesterday night! i guess they were too busy in the reproductive act to bother about rats. 😦
One word, my friend: TERRIER!
sulz: we can’t afford a dog! though maybe a good idea to force me to exercise since it would have be to walked every day. 😛
I’m a rat! An Aries Rat – the best kind. 😉
We had a rats come into our kitchen in Hong Kong from time to time. They lived in the trees outside the balcony, jumped on the roof, and walked in. They were never a real problem, though. Cute little buggers, actually – if it weren’t for that tail…
sulz: haha, any particular reason for that? 😉 urgh, rats are not cute at all! at least, the real ones. 😛
its funny but right round the chinese new year we saw 3 rats in our house. being on a high floor, it is impossible for rats to come here and we NEVER have had rats in our house. ianyway, we caught them n set them free in a more natuaral environment. considering im a rat, i hope this year rocks!!
sulz: you got rid of the rats in a more humane way than my house did! 😛 i hope this year is good for people in the year of the ox too, since i’m one. 😉
Hahaha….last year was the year of the fire-pig. Now git this: My girl that I met in August 2007, found out that I am a firefigter…so since my name was too close to her best friends in her phone i.e. Karl, Karma…she kept dialing me instead of her and visa-versa.
Now since I always speak my mind AND am politically incorrect she relisted me as FirePig in her phone, while having no idea that this (2007) was the year of the firepig.
I just thought it was funny and very coincidental.
sulz: that was a pretty funny story. 🙂 you and your girl sound very happy together too.
I used to live in the country where mice and snakes would get in, and that was traumatizing enough. A rat would have given me into a terror-induced heart attack.
Maybe if you throw cheese out into the yard, or across the street, they’ll be lured away. Better still, into the street, where they can be flattened by oncoming traffic.
sulz: urgh, what were you doing there! well, there are plenty of food outside the house, seeing as malaysia isn’t exactly the most hygienic place in the world. i think it gets less food in the house in fact! maybe it’s too stupid to find it way out. 😕
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