Oh rats!

Ok, here come a couple of quick up-datey posts for those of you that haven't given up on my blog yet! Sorry for the lack of writing. It's funny how used to a totally different culture one can become--things that everyone back home might find intriguing, I simply find common place now, so it hasn't been as exciting to write about everything on my blog =)

At first, Laura thought that seeing little rodents running around our house was kind of cute, but after they chewed through her precious soy-milk cartons and got the liquid ALL over her stuff, she decided they weren't so cute after all. Our Kiwi friend, Scott found this concoction called N-rat. Some kind of sticky glue to catch rats with--he bought it as a joke, thinking the description on the back of the rat's "frenzied scream" when caught was morbid and hilarious. But to Laura, the rodent situation was no longer a laughing matter. She spread the stuff over a styrofoam plate and used two pieces of dried fruit as bait.

Later that evening, we spotted the mouse run behind a box in our front room, so we let the styrofoam plate lie in wait by the box. I chased the mouse from behind the box, and it ran out--and RIGHT over the plate without getting stuck. What?! How did it do that? We decided to leave the plate where it was--maybe the fruit would prove tempting in the night.

Sure enough, Laura heard some scuffles in the night, and kept waiting for the "frenzied scream," but none came. In the morning, this is what we found:

Not a mouse, but a rat. And it seems to have died in quiet dignity.

We told the Kanchan family (Paul Kanchan is a Doctor volunteering at Baan Unrak for about a month) about our catch. They informed us that it was probably one of the rats that Gemma saved. Gemma is the young English woman that lives across the street from us and runs the dog sanctuary. Apparantly, in her informational booklet on the sanctuary, she has pictures of a rat family that she saved from some obscure corner of the

Baan Unrak school. John and Barbara and their little ratlings....woops. Sorry, John. We decided it would be wise not to tell Didi. She might kick us out for killing a rat, because harming animals is against the neohumanistic philosophy. I think Laura would argue, "Better the rat than my soy milk!"