Oh Rats...literally

If you are like me, and for your sake I sincerely hope you are not. Well, anyway if you are like me, you don't do well lying in bed trying to go to sleep. Counting sheep don't really help. My mind just wanders from problem to problem, a lot like a toilet, down, down, down. Work, what's wrong with Lucy, conversations that could have gone better if I'd only said... as you can tell, down hill. The last two nights have been such nights as these. Reading usually helps, although sometimes that too just leads to staring at a page.
"Why are you telling us this?" you may ask. Rightly so too, because no one in the blogosphere want to read depressing stories about my life, I don't even want to. There is a good, well, exciting ending paralleled only with the fall of rome or possibly when when Einstein found the 132nd way to not make a light bulb.
So, back to the story, I was not sleeping, so I decided to stop pretending like I was and got up. The garage and tools and squash starts are soothing to the nerves, so I went out there. And I wasn't alone. There was an odd noise next to the washer and drier so I switched on the lights. More noises. It was dark behind the drier, so I pulled out my handy dandy iPhone and went to the flashlight app (which is an invaluable tool) and shined it in the dark corner. More scurrying, and the drier hose quivered like an aspen. I went to the other side and then all ... well anyway, stuff started to happen.

My "two eyes, like stars, start[ed] from their spheres,

Thy knotted and combined locks to part

And each particular hair to stand on end,

Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:"

Young Hamlet's fathers said that, well his spectral image did, and I would have said it also, had I lived when young folks talked like that. I probably would have followed it up with, "Cry Havoc and let loose the dogs of war [that are sleeping in the back yard]" or "Something is not right in the state of [Washington]" So, like I said, the rat emerged from its dark lair (seven feet long at least, although it was 10:48 pm so it may have been larger) and ran, no, not at me but for the large brown cupboard that has stood there since old man time started his watch. There was a bit more scurrying hither and thither and noises (I thought it was two or three hundred rats all laughing at the good scare they gave me and snickering, but I could have been wrong). 

All of this leads to a logical ending. I will be purchasing a few hundred extra large rat traps and an elephant gun this weekend. I will also be cleaning up in the corners (when it's daytime of course) so there aren't places to hide next time. So keep watch, there will soon be pictures of large holes in the wall and me holding the plethora of freshly skinned rats in one hand and my personal bazooka in the other!