RAT!!!

I just got home after a nice evening out drinking and the cats had a fucking RAT in the dining room! At first I thought it was a toy, I couldn't believe that something REAL could squeak quite so loudly, but no such luck, it was a half dead rat. So I tried closing the doors into the other rooms while shrieking "Just kill it! Kill it!" but that didn't work at all, in fact the cats apparently had been waiting for me to come home so they could share. So I shrieked some more and got the broom, after throwing some cardboard at it, which accomplished precisely nothing, but I was thinking I could be tough and then squush it under the cardboard, but I am not that tough. SO I took the broom and I herded it to the front door and then I broomed it out onto the porch, and oh sweet jesus who I don't much believe in PLEASE make it have gone off and died somewhere else, because even though this is cruel and wrong, and if I had half a heart or was a sturdier soul I would go out and put an end to it's misery (with what, exactly? An axe?) I am a chicken shit mouse phobic terrified girly freak and I do NOT not not want to deal tomorrow with having to leave the house with a half dead or maybe horribly revived rat out on the porch. Oh holy shit, there are probably MORE rats in the house, and what do I do? I knew we had mice, but this was no mouse, this was a fucking RAT. Aaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuggggggggghhhhhhh!!!!

The update, thus far: the day after, 6:30 pm. Thank the gods for the monkeys, they're saving my sanity. And my other friend J, my brave friend who ventured to the basement & told me it was not too bad and then set some traps & said she would come back over to check them in a few days. My skin is crawling and I have the heebie jeebies to an almost unprecedented extent, but that may also be PMS, which is unfortunately currently controlling my emotions, so I keep starting to sniffle at my sad single state. I mean, this kind of thing is what boyfriends were invented for! Wish I had one. Or a roommate. Or a housekeeper, or an indentured servant, or something. A friendly robot.

I am going off the deep end, I just explained to Toby that he needed to shake this old age stuff and protect me from rats the way he always used to. Poor old Tobe, he can't help it, he is so old now and hasn't been feeling real well the last few days. It's not that I don't love Theo, annoying though he is, I do, madly - but Toby is the smartest most wonderful dog in the world, and now he's so old, so very old, and he can't see, and he can't hear real well, and he staggers and hobbles with the arthritis. Wish he had caught that rat last night, it would have given him a new lease on life. He was ecstatic when he caught the skunk two years ago, although granted that was not his brightest moment. Still he was protecting me and Theo, who was just a puppy then, and it turns out the folk tale about tomato juice is true, although the whole thing is really only funny in retrospect.

Last night, interestingly enough, it was Mr. Bill who had the rat, and Barbieri was observing intently from across the room. For all Barbieri's bravado and swagger, I have long thought that Mr. Bill, the "shy" one, was the real brains of the operation, and I was right. Mr. Bill has another scrape on his nose (he often does) and now I'm worried that they're rat souvenirs. I hope he can't/won't catch anything; what could cats catch from rats anyway? Baseball bats? Flats? Rodents can't have rabies, right? God I hope so.