Halloween Adventures

This year, I had the pleasure of walking around with the kids (and a group of neighbors) for Halloween. Rod wanted to be the one to answer the door, but I really think he wanted to surprise trick-or-treaters with his Superman costume.

We got about 10 minutes into the neighborhood walk when I received a phone call from Rod. Thank goodness he was the one who was home. He had gone into the garage briefly to get something from his car and on his way back in, a RAT scurried from the garage into the house. Rod said the body was about 5 inches and adding the tail made it about 9 inches. AAAAAAAGGGGGHHHH. He chased it around the house and at one point it jumped onto the first stair, as if it wanted to dash upstairs. It would have been a nightmare trying to find it if it did that. He said it ran under every conceivable cover and when I returned home, all the couches were upside down from his searches. The rat even ran over his foot once. Eventually he chased it out the front door. Ugh. To top it off, the kids were getting ready for bed and a huge grasshopper had found its way upstairs and was chaotically bouncing off the walls. it didn't help that Kenneth was laughing hysterically and yelling "It's got enormous fangs! Look at the fangs!!" Evelyn was beside herself with tiredness and got so upset about it, especially when Kenneth grabbed her dress she had set out for the next school day to use to capture the grasshopper. I intervened, trapped the grasshopper in the middle room and when Rod finally arrived at the scene, he went in to get it. Sure enough, he agreed that "this sucker has a set of choppers." Great.

This Halloween rat was rodent incident number 4 in the Walline household. We've been here for a little over 4 years, so once per year isn't too bad I suppose. Some of you may recall my experience with finding a dead, disgusting, drowned rat in the midst of my clean WASH as I unloaded it from the washing machine to the dryer. This was a couple of years ago, around the same time a mouse crawled through our cooling down oven to grab a freshly baked mini-muffin from the cooling rack and try to drag it back down. The other rodent experience involved me seeing a mouse run through the garage, and because this was our first rodent incident, Rod didn't believe me until he found said mouse drowned in a bucket that had a couple inches of water in it.

Life's an adventure, though I'd prefer adventures without animals involved on any level.

I am leaving for Taiwan again on Friday evening and will be back the following Friday. Rod launches the 2nd edition of his magazine in my absence. He's so excited about it!