Of Mice and Men

This is the tale...of US vs. MORRIS.

Sunday, December 10th
So I'm ready to get a bunch of stuff accomplished...I wanted to clean my car (thanks to our advertisers, Maguiars) and then haul ass on something for work. I gave Kraig the project of installing the free keypad garage door opener I scored off Freecycle.

Kraig hollers at me that he wants me to write down the code from the garage door opener while he reads it out (it's written on the mechanism, which is on the ceiling)...so we're standing outside, and as Kraig goes to walk to the back of the garage I see this HUGE thing scurry from the top of the doorframe (the door that leads into the house) along the wall.

I start screaming that it's a rat, and really...if you recall the Bruno incident...I do NOT do well with creepy crawly things. Rats included. So i'm out on the street shrieking and yelling and smacking myself with my hands in order to get imaginary rats off of me, and Kraig starts the hunt to find the rat.

The rat named Morris.

So Morris sneaks into this pile of cardboard crap along one side of the garage. Cardboard crap includes folded up boxes and this HUGE Mulan movie display that an ex boyfriend stole out of the movie theater for me 10 years ago and Kraig woudln't let me throw it out. So Kraig's tossing hte cardboard out on the street in order to clear out the garage and find MOrris, I'm texting Carrie and Nicole D flipping out, this kid on his bike comes over and watches all of this laughing...

I got on the phone with Carrie and suddenly I had to let her go 'cause i saw this BIG BLACK THING moving along one of the boxes tossed from the garage...it was a mutha f*cking HUGE black widow spider. I knew that sometimes we had little baby ones, but this thing was flippin' MASSIVE.
Imagine this looking at you:




Now i'm REALLY freaking out. Kraig comes over, and even he's freaked out a bit (the dude loves bugs and crap, and growing up in California he's pretty unphased by black widow spiders...growing up in OTtawa, I've never seen a black widow in my LIFE, let alone one the size of a cat)...he tried to kick it away but it kept crawling back to the garage, so finally i shoved a piece of cardboard on it and stomped on it (which, apparently, is the most effective method of killing black widows and their egg sacks according to my online research).

I can't even BEGIN to tell you the amount of goo that comes out of a huge black widow spider. It was like someone poured syrup all over my driveway.

And by driveway, i mean the 2 foot space between my garage door and the street.

So back to MOrris.

Kraig has him cornered behind a chunk of cardboard, and asks what he should do, i'm yelling things that probably weren't even English, so he KICKS the cardboard, Morris gets away...

Finally he tells me I need to get some traps.

Side note: rats are nasty and carry a billion diseases. The last time I saw a rat ready to attack me was when i was in a 3rd world country and a rat popped it's head out of the DRAIN...and i was SHOWERING...not cool. Not cool at all.Seriously traumatized me.

I drive to Home Depot (where I called Nicole D in order to continue flipping out) to get my trap action on. I rush in, tell them I need to find their lead rat expert, and the dude tells me how I need to use the big sticky traps.

For those not in the know, basically it's a piece of plastic coated with this uber sticky stuff. You place some peanut butter in the middle and the rat goes for it, and then gets stuck, and basically dies a slow painful death.

Good times.

So i buy 2 packs (2 traps each = 4 traps) and some rat poison for good measure.

Get home, and Kraig tells me how those traps are mean, blah blah. So i tell him to put the poison in the center, PLUS the pb, then that way Morris can at least die faster once he's on teh trap.

So he puts on trap in this cupboard that apparently Morris had been hiding in, and one over by some shelving.

Cumulative Results
Morris: 1
Team H: 0
Ursula the Spider: disqualified.

Monday, December 11

I get up and I'm pretty cranky because I had to park my car outside so that Kraig could park his car in the garage. No WAYYY am I parking in the garage where Morris is ready to either eat me or at the very least, chew on the wires in my car.

Before you laugh at that last comment, apparently where I work there's a problem with rats doing that to people's cars that are parked in front. So suck it.

I get home, call Kraig, and because I can't figure out how to turn off Bluetooth in my car he ends up on speakerphone...I told him to stay on the line while I scoped out the Morris situation...I go to check the rat traps...nope, no Morris. However opening the cupboard door freaked me out so much I ran out of the garage shrieking and yelling, which could be heard from the car (since my car has a speaker and receiver for bluetooth calls), and Kraig was near his friend Chris who was LAUGHING his head off 'cause he could hear me yelling, and now everyoneo n the street could hear me yelling and kraig and chris laughing from my car's speakers.


So when Kraig got home, he pointed out that the poison cube raised the peanut butter so high, that MOrris had figured out how to lick it off without actually getting on the trap. He removed the poison and just put a blob of pb on the traps, and put them back in the garage.

Cumulative Results
Morris: 2
Team H: 0
Ursula the Spider: disqualified.

Tuesday, December 12th

Now at this point I"m really annoyed and tired of parking outside, so once again I drive up to the garage after work and scope out the trap situation.

Mutha effa.

MOrris had somehow eaten ALL the peanut butter off the traps.

I went to park outside again.

Kraig comes home, and he's stressed over work stuff and he's also getting nervous about MOrris eating his comic book collection (stored in the garage) 'cause that's what happened to his comics at his mom's house. He goes to get the traps...

WTF...there were rat pawprints all OVER the traps! Those things aren't sticky at all! Although the trap managed to shred a huge chunk of skin/fur off of Morris, he still got away. So now i'm tired, hungry (I had just gotten home), and ready to flip on Morris and his furry ass. Kraig was busy with work, so I took the 2 traps covered in pawprints and the package of unopened traps back to Home Depot.

I get to Home Depot,a nd i'm like "WTF there's PAW PRINTS...this stuff sucks!" and the guy was all "Hey, weren't you the one who was here on Sunday? We were talking about you today".
Me: "Uhh...why?"
Home Depot Dude: "'cause we saw 3 rats hanging out on the shelves in Aisle 3"
Me: "Wait, you have rats?"
Home Depot Dude: "Oh yeah, no big deal we have them everywhere here, but never just hanging out all three on a shelf like that"
Me: "I'm going to VOMIT now. I want to return these traps"...

The dude felt so bad fo rme that he also refunded me the rat poison, even though I didn't take it back for a refund.

Team H's new strategy: old skool snap traps. At $1.97 each, I could afford 3.

I get home and get Kraig to show me how these suckers work. The only time I've ever seen a trap work was in cartoons. Those things are CRAZY dangerous. And super sensitive. We slather peanut butter on the bait trigger thingy and Kraig goes to set them up in the garage.

I didn't hear any loud snapping noises at night, but then again I also didn't hear Kraig wash up and go to bed 'cause I passed out after watching The Colbert Report.

Cumulative Results
Morris: 3
Team H: 0
Ursula the Spider: disqualified.
Home Depot: stuffed with irony...they sell rat traps and yet, have a rat problem.

Wednesday, December 13th

Waiting to hear back from Kraig if maybe over the night MOrris got snapped. Otherwise, stay tuned.

The Morris saga continues!