deebeedee

A new trailer for the sequel to The Departed Pixar’s Ratatouille is up on YouTube. It looks like it’s intended for a Chinese audience.

So the film is about “a kitchen boy who can’t cook” and a “rat who dreams of becoming a chef” and how together they “can be the greatest chef in Paris.”

Woopdeedoo. I wouldn’t want any disgusting rodent near my food. The first time I caught a rat in the house was in the kitchen several years ago. I was able to catch it by using one of those glue papers. I had placed the trap on top of the kitchen cabinets (there’s space between it and the ceiling). When I went to retrieve it, the fella was still alive. As I was about to reach for it to dispose of it, the darn creature hissed at me.

Using glue paper, I discovered, was not the best way to catch rats. I threw the glue paper with its catch into the garbage can outside, then I found out the next day that it was able to free itself from it and got away (ooh, just writing about it is giving me the heebie-jeebies). Someone told me I had to “take care” of the rat before disposing of it.

I ramped up by using a combination of glue paper and mouse traps. That was effective for a while, but little did I know an infestation was developing. At night, we would hear scampering in the ceiling. When I would wake up in the middle of the night and turn the lights on in the kitchen, I would see a couple of the pests skittering away into hiding.

It got so bad that I suspected that there were actually two warring factions of rat families in the house. You know how I know? I knew it by their scent. Yes I know, disgusting. I detected a distinct scent from one side of the house versus the one marked up in the opposite side of the house. And why do I say ‘warring factions’ and ‘rat families’? ‘Warring factions’ is evidenced by the commotion in the ceiling at night and ‘families’, because there was evidence of offspring (I caught two).

I had to do something fast. I went for a solution I was avoiding since the beginning: rat poison. But it turned out to be the most effective way of getting rid of the whole lot of them. I placed a box in the garage. It was all eaten up by the next day. I replaced it right away with a new box and soon it was all consumed as well. Within a week, the pests were gone. But of course, we had to deal with the retrieving of dead rats and the inevitable smell.

You must be thinking this whole disgusting ordeal was finally over. Well, it was not. There must’ve been a carcass somewhere hidden under the kitchen floor boards or something. We never found it but what ensued was evidence of its presence. Maggots started to appear all over the kitchen floor. But before I could take action, an army of ants came out and attacked the baby flies! I let nature take its course and watched for a while. I couldn’t believe I had a Discovery Channel show right there in our kitchen (those ants are amazing – they once got rid of a nest of wasps under the eaves of our roof by invading it and driving them away). When I got bored, I doused the whole floor with Lysol.

Now if any of you are thinking you’ll never set foot in our humble abode after what you’ve just read, I assure you our own disgust prompted us to thoroughly scrub, disinfect and purge anything that may have come in contact with the critters. And what’s more, we’ve been pest-free for years. :^)

trailer via GeckoCafe

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 17th, 2007 at 1:35 am and is filed under Entertainment, Family/Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.