Rat Race

27 July 2006
Rat Race
Amy and I finally moved into our room last night. I’m sure Kenyi was happy to have her own room back. The room we’re in was being used as storage. There was a very old, torn queen sized mattress, a single bed with a wooden frame, boxes of old toys and school work, and some workman helmets and tools. Oh, there was also another bug-ridden foam mattress that had obviously been used by the resident rats for bedding. It reminded me a lot of the sheds, or “little” house on Grandpa’s farm… mostly because of the smell (dust and old stuff). I’m not complaining; it was actually a bit nostalgic.
The funny part is that the old, wooden bed was going to be Amy’s. The Chief provided me with a metal frame to raise my new mattress off the floor. It was actually quite nice. Amy was not exactly thrilled with her new bed, especially since the mattress was very old and kind of smelly. But, we double checked it for bed bugs and didn’t find any, but that’s not the best indicator since those buggers are masters of hiding. Anyway, we swept the floor, hung clean curtains and moved our stuff into the room. Later, I walked in to find Amy Saran wrapping her entire mattress. I laughed so hard I nearly peed. In addition, as she moved her mattress to wrap it, she discovered at least 20 ounces of rat poop under her bed. My inclination was to leave it since she couldn’t smell it, it wasn’t going to touch her and it didn’t bite. That wasn’t exactly the same way Amy felt. We had to move her mattress and lift up the heavy wooden frame so she could sweep up the rat poop. Fair enough, I didn’t argue.
Based on the amount of rat poop in the room, the foam mattress ripped to shreds for bedding, and later, the sound of the Fiji International Rat Derby in our attic, I’m pretty sure we displaced an entire civilization of rats from their rat kingdom in our room. We didn’t sleep a wink the first night due to what sounded like 20 lb rats clamoring clumsily from one end of the house to the other, over and over and over again. I can’t possibly imagine what they were doing. There is also a nest of baby rats in the attic just over Amy’s bed. We can hear the “little ones” squeaking when the frantic adults stop their silly rat race. I also dreamed all night of rat retaliation. It’s too gory to describe.
The moral of this story is that the rat race is a pointless waste of time and energy which causes you stress and frustration while getting you nowhere… and makes you miss out on the little things in life. *grin*

July 30, 2006
We’ve been in our room for several nights now and have adapted to the sound of the rats. Amy even had a close encounter of the rodent kind last night. She had gone into the kitchen to brush her teeth and immediately ran back out. It was really funny. When she saw Ralph, our rat (or at least one of them), and he saw her, they both froze instantaneously, then each high-tailed it in opposite directions. Ralph almost knocked all the dishes off the shelf as he clamored back up the wall into his attic hole. Amy didn’t say anything as she ran into the other room because Akisi and Kenyi don’t seem to mind the rats and we don’t want to insult them. We also don’t want them to kill the rats. If they knew the rats bothered us they would do everything they could to get rid of them. People may think we’re crazy for not wanting to kill the rats. I know Terry does, since he tried to buy us rat poison in Sigatoka yesterday, but I wouldn’t let him. For me, it’s the burden of rat murder on my conscious. I couldn’t live with myself if I caused so many babies to be orphaned. And now that I can sleep through the rat derby, I don’t really mind Ralph and his family. Amy’s not so sentimental and wouldn’t mind rat blood on her hands. But, we’ve both agreed that we’d rather not deal with the aftermath of rat genocide. Not only would the dead bodies somehow have to be removed, those bodies that weren’t in plain sight, i.e. rats that had met their final demise in the walls, would create a terrible odor. The noise and infrequent encounters I can deal with, the smell of rotting rat carcasses, I cannot. So, we will continue to peacefully coexist with the rat family and may even meet their children someday.