Rat update
...and here's my attempt to drive KC readership into the ground: an update on the rat situation, first broached in my feast-of-tabernacles-related post, Sukkah stuff. Warning - if you are squeamish in any way shape or form, skip to the next post.

So the shed where I kept my sukkah had been overrun with rats. The shed is a bit of a shanty, an all-wooden job wedged between the back of my garage (guest house, that is) and the back fence. Mrs. Ralphie insisted we tear it down and buy some sort of all-weather, impenetrable shed. I said I didn't think it was necessary, the rats were all gone, and besides, we keep a lot of stuff in there, and the guest house water heater is in there, too. I said I would at least determine the volume of the water heater to see if we could enclose it if we decide to remove the shed.

I entered the musty shed and took a couple of steps towards the water heater, then jerked backwards in revulsion as a rat scurried across the top. I then mentioned to Mrs. R. that maybe she was right about this whole tearing-down-the-shed thing. So we bought a Rubbermaid shed and moved as much stuff as we could from the old shed to the new. The rest we just threw in the yard, basically.

Here comes the scary part. Our friendly neighborhood handyman tore down the shed... and what he found their might shock you. First there was the bucket o' rats.

Yes, it seems that an exterminator from a while back had done more than just set a few traditional mousetraps that bore no fruit. In the back of the shed, he had set up some sort of master trap - kind of a like a roach motel, where the critters check in but don't receive a bill under the door tallying up the adult movies they requested on the pay-per-view, if you know what I'm saying. The only problem is the guy never bothered coming back to check on the dang thing. So we had a bucket o' dead rats in our shed for who knows how long.

But that's not the worst part.

When said handyman started to enclose the water heater with the aluminum cabinet I retrieved from Home Depot, he noticed something. Something... hideous. It seems that the water heater was propped up on some cinderblocks, and the rats somehow entered the shed that way. They might have even lived (still live???) under there. So the guy filled it in with cement, entombing any remaining rats.

No, that's still not the hideous part. He couldn't enclose the water heater because he first has to find a replacement for the part of the water heater ONTO WHICH A RAT'S BODY HAD BEEN SEARED, YEA MELTED.

Of course, Handyman was sure to point this out to Mrs. R., who couldn't sleep last night because the sickening image haunted her dreams.

And if you think I'm going out there to take a gander, think again, my friend. Think again. - served up by Ralphie @ 12:55 PM