1 down, ? to go

I can't let the day pass without acknowledging the very kind deed my Uncle Barry did for me last night.

I was calling the dogs to come inside from the back yard last night. Buddy decided he was more interested in barking at something clear across the yard and didn't want to come in. So I traipsed out there to get him and when he saw me coming he decided he'd best make a bee-line for the house.

I'm not quite sure how I didn't notice this on my trip past it the first time, but I certainly didn't miss it on the way back. There it was, right there on the back porch - a dead rat.

Definitely a rat, too. Not one of those little mousy things the cats left out in the front driveway for me recently. No sir, this was a big honking rat.

I stifled (I think) a scream and hurried past it into the house and slammed and locked the door tightly just on the off chance that it might suddenly spring up and try to come in.

C'mon now, breathe, breathe, breathe. Don't be ridiculous. It's so obviously dead.

Then I was full of questions. How did it get there? Did one of the dogs kill it? Did it die from the poison? If it ate some of the poison and then a dog killed it, could that be a problem for the dog? And the most important question of all:

How'm I gonna get rid of it?

Nasty critters just creep me out. They make me nuts. I don't want to encounter them in any fashion, dead or alive (though if I'm forced to then definitely preferably dead), and I certainly don't want to dispose of them.

I'm such a girl that way.

Once, years ago when I was in college still living at home, and my brother was maybe 13, I got up in the middle of the night to go the bathroom and came back to find a water bug (which for anyone who doesn't know is just a nice term for "giant cockroach") on the wall over the head of my bed. I was surprised that my screams alone didn't send anyone running to the rescue, but since they didn't, I called my brother on the phone (no, this was not laziness. I didn't want to lose track of the bug. I'd have never been able to sleep in that room again if I had) and asked him (almost incoherently from his later depiction of the story) if he could come back to my room for a minute. He raced back there, thinking from the way I sounded that something was truly wrong, then dissolved in a fit of laughter. So he saved me from the water bug - then he never let me live it down.

Hey, Phillip, those things FLY you know. Do you know how scarred for life I would be if I went to swat one of those things off the wall and it flew at me?

But I digress. Back to the rat.

I knew I was gonna have to get rid of it because if, God forbid, a dog should try to bring THAT in the house and start chewing on it then that was going to be the absolute death of me.

So, I called my uncle.

To his credit, he didn't laugh, tell me not to be ridiculous or anything of the sort. In fact, I didn't even have to ask him to come over and please take the rat away - I just told him there was one, and he said he'd be there in a few minutes to take care of it.

I am pretty sure I probably sounded on the phone much the way I sounded on the phone the night of the water bug incident.

So all the way over to my house drove he, coming armed with a bag and a pair of needle nose pliers, just to pick up and dispose of the hideous nasty critter so that I would never have to take a second look at it.

I know I thanked you last night. But, thanks again. No, really. THANK YOU.