persimmonfrost | Entries tagged with rat

Me, Ashley and a potato

Temperature is headed back up so I made an executive decision that tonight’s dinner is going to be new potatoes with dill (steamed in the microwave) and a raw zucchini salad. Potatoes are washed and ready to cook, zucchini is sliced and salted. The hardest thing I’ll have to do is go out and snip some dill from the garden. What a trial! The Dover sole is going to have to wait until I feel like baking or sauteing it. But it’s no big, Glinda and I can make a meal out of veggies very happily. And there will be dessert. And wine.

Cover of People Will Talk

So just now I was having some lunch and I managed to forget that I’d already opened my can of V8. As I picked it up, I shook it. Yeah. Now in my defense I have to say that I’m still a little groggy. I had a nap earlier, during which I had one of the oddest dreams ever. I’d been watching “People Will Talk” which is easily my favorite Cary Grant film, and fell asleep with it on. So I started dreaming that I was watching a favorite TV show and that they were doing a salute to this film by using the dialogue over the show’s action. But the show itself was about a married couple both of whom needed CPAP machines, and who went out to buy them at a clothing store, where the wife was trying on cocktail dresses. I know what you’re going to say. Don’t bother. My friends tell me all the time that it’s a really strange country inside my head, and days like this I believe them.

Changing direction now, I have to report that I put some of the blue toilet bowl cakes out in the garden yesterday and I checked four or five times during the evening, but didn’t see any rats. This doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but it made me happy, even though the entire garden (and my back hallway which is where the rest of the tablets are right now) smells vaguely like a gas station bathroom. For those of you just tuning in, toilet bowl tablets are offensive to rats, apparently. I got that piece of information from one of the Streets and San people who were here to bait the alley a couple of weeks ago.

I also learned that vitamin D3 will kill rats. It gives them heart attacks, according to the gal who talked about it on EveryBlock. I’m not exactly sanguine about giving rats heart attacks, but I’d rather it was something relatively fast than the slow, icky death from the bait they use. I asked her about other animals and she said it only does that to rats and bats, but I do know that D is a vitamin that builds up in the system and can cause harm even to humans. I’ll have to give this more thought. She also said that lime will kill them. Again with the “who knew?” Considering that a case of the plague just showed up in Oregon, I think caution really is called for. Be careful out there.

And now I need to get back to Anna Magdalena which is chugging away in directions unexpected. I’m terribly pleased.

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Mirrored from Persimmon Frost.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against rats per se. I just don’t like them around my house. They’re voracious and can be highly aggressive, which is one reason why they’ve adapted so well to city life. I know they make great pets and I’ve met some lovable rats in my time, but city rats? Not so much.

A few nights ago, Glinda and I were out in the garden, and I saw something run past, hugging the wall of the garage. You don’t live in the city your whole life without learning how to recognize various forms of wildlife by their silhouette and the way they move. We have rabbits; this was not a rabbit. It was also not a stray cat, dog, opossum, raccoon, vole, wombat or T-rex (Though I’m told that when our late, un-lamented imported Japanese grass, stuff that laughed in the face of our lawn mower, was at its tallest there were sightings of tigers, giraffes and dinosaurs.) This was a rat. It wasn’t threatening anyone, it was just using the garage wall superhighway to get from one side of the garden to the other. The problem is that it or its kin, have been sighted around here quite a lot lately, so I reported it to Streets and Sanitation.

The S&S car showed up two days later, manned by some very nice folks who do a thankless job. I brought them into the garden to show them where the rat had been and the guy said, “I see a problem already.” Of course I said, “Oh gosh, what?” ”This is way too nice a garden,” he said. ”They want to be here.” I told him I’d never heard that rats had well-developed aesthetic senses, but that I’d bear that in mind.

This very nice man, named Goodman (Quite apt.), taught me how to recognize a rat hole (Goes straight down about two to three feet, and then horizontal.) and that bleach, ammonia and mothballs all deter them. I’m not big on mothballs since they’re not only probably carcinogenic but they’re very damaging to cats and can cause total liver failure in short order, but the other two wouldn’t be bad to sprinkle around the house. The bleach would certainly kill the weeds. I asked about peppermint oil and he confirmed that they hate it, so our garden is going to smell like peppermint this summer, I think. I also have a bottle of animal repellent that we got when shopping the other day. We wanted to use it on our fruit and veggies, but it gets into the plant and makes them taste and smell horrible, which is not really what we want in our crops. However as soon as the wind dies down a bit here – I totes do not want a face full of that stuff – I’m going to spray along the back of the yards from the sidewalk across to Linda’s place.

To be honest, I wish we didn’t have to call out S&S. I wish they didn’t have to kill as many rats as they can or put out poison where other animals can get it. Goodman told me that yeah, rabbits may well eat the stuff. I don’t like killing things, and I sure don’t like doing it by accident while attempting to kill other things. I wish there was a better way to live with these creatures. All we’re really doing is breeding smarter, stronger rats, and that’s not a good thing.

My rabbit, Nutmeg; she’s one reason why I love bunnies.