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January 2018

Whatever Happened to Broccoli and His Rat?

Maybe you saw a video I posted to Facebook very late Wednesday night. It was simply captioned:

I’m going to set my house on fire.

Because that seemed reasonable at the moment.

Broccoli who is a Grey Cat with Rat in his Mouth

Click to watch

In fact, it’s still sort of a good idea.

So yeah… we’re not great with vermin and didn’t help the cause at all. I admit it. It was late, I was tired, and the only reason we even have cats is that back in 2011 we really did have a rat and mouse problem and I grabbed Sparky from the pound and she went on a murderous rampage. She eliminated all the rats and a couple of lizards too.

She’s a very effective cat… a good eater too.

In any event, after I screamed and the rat got loose (my bad) I did a quick Facebook update. Here’s a link to the video of Broccoli completely wandering away from the rat he dropped in our closet.

And then it went down. And by down I mean downhill. Like a spiral. And it was terrible and I was up until 3 am. Mercifully my husband was out of town so only my son had his Thursday hijacked by lack of sleep.

We sealed off the bedroom door. My son slept in my daughter’s bedroom and my daughter and I shared a bed the first night. We left Sparky in my son’s room, hopeful that she’d kill the rat. When we awoke and there was no dead rat we decided to open the door and I ran to the hardware store for snap traps.

36 hours later there was still no dead rat. We were grossed out and dejected. We also had to keep doors shut so that pets couldn’t get near the snap traps. Then my friend Jerome told me about his last crummy landlord and the efficiency of electric traps.

I ran back to the hardware store and this time I bought The Rat Zapper
The rat zapper killed the rat really fast They were expensive compared to snap traps but my sanity was slowly spilling away so it felt like money well spent.

This morning I woke up to a red light blinking on the Rat Zapper, and the best news was that Mr. G was home and it was his turn to deal with the rat. I knew it had been electrocuted but I didn’t know what it would look like.

I went to play tennis and came home to this in the outdoor trash bin. A bit unceremonious, but let’s not pretend that anything has been dignified lately.

[gross image ahead – you’ve been warned] Read More »Whatever Happened to Broccoli and His Rat?