For the tl;dr crowd: I BATTLED A GIANT RAT (How’d this teeny hamster elude me for two hours?)
My house is a wreck because we’re packing things and sorting stuff and I heard this weird sound that I discounted as the breeze from my fan rattling some posters while I was working on something in my office. I got up to take a break from what I was working on and decided to do a little packing (I don’t get breaks unless I’m eating, I just do different stuff) and saw this thing move out of the corner of my eye and suddenly, I was a ninja ready for a fight. (Imagine ‘the slowest white girl impersonation of Bruce Lee adopting a fighting stance’ whilst saying “holysheeetwhadafuckwasthaaaat?” and you have a fairly accurate idea of what I did.)
After kicking some boxes trying to elicit a response from this undoubtedly vicious alien creature, I grabbed my baseball bat and a flashlight from the living room and swept the room…and saw eye shine. There was this HUGE (well, not really huge) UGLY (actually it was kind of cute) RAT (hamster) WITH THESE BEEDY BLACK LIFELESS EYES LIKE A DOLL’S EYES (that’s kind of true).
We had ourselves a nice little Mexican stand-off, Mr. RAT (hamster) and I wherein I looked at him and he looked at me and I looked at him looking at me and he looked at me looking at him, me being armed with a blue baseball bat I’ve had since I was 8 and he being armed with RABIES HE’S HAD HIS ENTIRE LIFE, PROLLY (I couldn’t see that it didn’t have a tail so I was still thinking it was a rat at this point, but it was small like a palm rat.) After a moment, I said, “Okay, look. I don’t want to kill you…and I’m telling you that you don’t want to kill me. So, I’m gonna put my bat down and we’re going to have a discussion about how to extricate ourselves from this predicament.”
I put my bat down and explained to him that I was not going to kill him, but he needed to go. After 45 minutes of FIGHTING TO THE DEATH WITH HIS BITEY LITTLE TEETH (he waddled away really, really fast), I lost him in the chaos of my office and finally had to call in the Big Guns (I wept for my mommy) (I didn’t weep, but I did need help to keep eyes on him.)
After another hour of tearing up my house, I managed to catch the little bugger and set him free. I feel kind of bad, he’s someone’s pet and not equipped to survive in the world outside, but I don’t know how he got into my house in the first place (this is troubling***), I don’t know from whence he came, and we’re totally not equipped to take care of a cutey-patootie hamster (GIANT FUCKING RAT WITH RABIES) which would, undoubtedly, escape from whatever temporary enclosure we could devise (AND EAT OUR FACES OFF IN THE NIGHT.)
So, that was my adventure for the night. How about you?
*** Two or three weeks after we first moved into this place, I was hanging with Rickey when I got a call from my mom that there was a snake in the kitchen and it had come out of the dishwasher. I’ve got a bit of a thing about snakes (me no likey them up close and in my space) so mom took care of it, doing her best Steve Irwin impression as she got it and released it to the wild, but I’m struck by how cyclical it seems, this random hamster appearing in our house two or three weeks before we move out.
My house is a wreck because we’re packing things and sorting stuff and I heard this weird sound that I discounted as the breeze from my fan rattling some posters while I was working on something in my office. I got up to take a break from what I was working on and decided to do a little packing (I don’t get breaks unless I’m eating, I just do different stuff) and saw this thing move out of the corner of my eye and suddenly, I was a ninja ready for a fight. (Imagine ‘the slowest white girl impersonation of Bruce Lee adopting a fighting stance’ whilst saying “holysheeetwhadafuckwasthaaaat?” and you have a fairly accurate idea of what I did.)
After kicking some boxes trying to elicit a response from this undoubtedly vicious alien creature, I grabbed my baseball bat and a flashlight from the living room and swept the room…and saw eye shine. There was this HUGE (well, not really huge) UGLY (actually it was kind of cute) RAT (hamster) WITH THESE BEEDY BLACK LIFELESS EYES LIKE A DOLL’S EYES (that’s kind of true).
We had ourselves a nice little Mexican stand-off, Mr. RAT (hamster) and I wherein I looked at him and he looked at me and I looked at him looking at me and he looked at me looking at him, me being armed with a blue baseball bat I’ve had since I was 8 and he being armed with RABIES HE’S HAD HIS ENTIRE LIFE, PROLLY (I couldn’t see that it didn’t have a tail so I was still thinking it was a rat at this point, but it was small like a palm rat.) After a moment, I said, “Okay, look. I don’t want to kill you…and I’m telling you that you don’t want to kill me. So, I’m gonna put my bat down and we’re going to have a discussion about how to extricate ourselves from this predicament.”
I put my bat down and explained to him that I was not going to kill him, but he needed to go. After 45 minutes of FIGHTING TO THE DEATH WITH HIS BITEY LITTLE TEETH (he waddled away really, really fast), I lost him in the chaos of my office and finally had to call in the Big Guns (I wept for my mommy) (I didn’t weep, but I did need help to keep eyes on him.)
After another hour of tearing up my house, I managed to catch the little bugger and set him free. I feel kind of bad, he’s someone’s pet and not equipped to survive in the world outside, but I don’t know how he got into my house in the first place (this is troubling***), I don’t know from whence he came, and we’re totally not equipped to take care of a cutey-patootie hamster (GIANT FUCKING RAT WITH RABIES) which would, undoubtedly, escape from whatever temporary enclosure we could devise (AND EAT OUR FACES OFF IN THE NIGHT.)
So, that was my adventure for the night. How about you?
*** Two or three weeks after we first moved into this place, I was hanging with Rickey when I got a call from my mom that there was a snake in the kitchen and it had come out of the dishwasher. I’ve got a bit of a thing about snakes (me no likey them up close and in my space) so mom took care of it, doing her best Steve Irwin impression as she got it and released it to the wild, but I’m struck by how cyclical it seems, this random hamster appearing in our house two or three weeks before we move out.