Keep the Door Shut

Ever since we arrived home from our trip to the states we’ve had a little problem: jungle critters. I’ve always prided myself that our house was pretty cockroach free, but they’ve made a comeback. However, they are the least of our worries. Several nights ago Dan and I were sitting on the couch and in walks a tarantula, even with the screen door closed. He wasn’t too big but several nights later his larger cousin came to join him right in the middle of our marriage class.

An even bigger problem has been Mr. Rat. I’d never had an encounter with one until a few weeks ago. Dan was on call at the hospital and I kept hearing rustling in the laundry room. I called Dan to come home to find the culprit and after investigating he said he couldn’t find anything. As he was walking out of the laundry room he kicked the washer and out ran an enormous rat (well at least I thought it was enormous). I’m usually a pretty calm person when it comes to creepy-crawlies, but I went running for my life . Over the next week and a half the rat became Dan’s biggest nemesis as he tried multiple ways to get rid of it. The first night the rat ate all the poison we left out for him and we thought our troubles were over. However we knew he was back the next night when he go into some “sacred” cereal we’d bought in the states. Now we knew our rat had a strong stomach. Next Dan tried a homemade bucket trap in hopes of drowning the rat, but our visitor was pretty smart and only would eat the food at the front of the plank leading up to the water. After that Dan moved to a spring trap. Dan set it up several nights in a row so sensitive that it took him quite a while to get it to set without snapping back on Dan. Somehow our rat was able to get the food every time without setting it on himself. Now we knew our rat wasn’t just smart, but a genius. After several more days I was preparing lunch and looked over and there sat Mr. Rat in the laundry room right in the middle of the day. Now he’d gotten way too arrogant. I climbed on the counter and told Dan to get over there. Dan grabbed a broom and used his baseball skills to stun him. As Dan brushed him outside to finish him off he kept making these sad little squeaks and we almost felt sorry for him. Maybe he’d visited us so many nights we felt partial to our unwanted pest.
Last night was the scariest of all. As we were sitting in the living room I looked into the kitchen and there was a snake slithering around. His coloring was black, red, and yellow, and both Dan and I thought coral snake. He was a little guy, but our adrenaline was running as Dan brushed him out of the house and killed him with the broom handle. Thankfully we didn’t have Anna on her floor mat. We investigated on the computer and are hopeful his markings tell us it’s a harmless black ground snake, which mimic the coloring of a poisonous coral snake…we sure hope so.
Though it rains almost every day here, it is the rainy season and maybe our unwanted guests are trying to escape the rain. Almost all the critters have come at night when we’ve had the screen doors closed but the main doors open. Hopefully by keeping the doors closed we can keep them away; at least that’s what I keep telling myself.
AUGH…as I write this Jael is yelling that there’s a frog in the house!

Our snake after Dan got through finishing him off.