The pleasures of the subtropics

Aw gross. There are fucking rats here. Up until last night I'd been holding out hope that somehow all those little turds that looked just like rat turds were actually from the tree frogs, and then I went into the kitchen and startled a great big fucking brown rat on the counter - agitated the poor thing so much that it fell off. Anyways, that tipped me off as to where they were coming in from, and hopefully how to keep them out.

We called the agency, who just sent round a guy to put down poison, which is gonna mean nothing but stink and, eventually, poison-immune rats. You simply cannot rely on a slow-acting oral poison to exterminate a community of animals whose life cycle is based on large litters and high mortality, evolution is working too fast. And frankly I don't want to exterminate the poor little assholes. They're cute. Aside from being revolting disease vectors, they're quite nice animals and they don't deserve to die, and if they are going to die, some animal should get lots of pleasure from killing them.

Our neighbours told us our predecessors dealt with the problem by keeping a carpet python. Those are supposed to often come up into the houses around here after the rats - theirs was a wild one they got a permit for, and they took it with them when they left. I sort of hope that a new one moves in (the locals have promised me that we'd only get carpet pythons in the house; the highly poisonous snakes hereabouts, the brown snakes, apparently "don't climb". Hmph. We'll hope for the best).

I think we'll deal with the problem by fostering cats. I miss Lexie fucking terribly but she is doing really well at Sugarplum's now, and it's agreed by all and sundry that it doesn't make sense to move her here. But I don't want to replace her, and the F-word doesn't want us to permanently take in a pet before we have some kids, so we are trying to get into a local cat-fostering programme.