This is why we must always be flexible, kids, and never hold our plans with too tight a fist. Something will come along, and you won’t see it coming, and if you let it, it will get you all bent out of shape. Listen and learn (I did).
Our tale begins last Sunday evening. Kirsten and I were getting ready to go to bed later than we should have, considering the next day was Monday, when she got down on the floor to look at “…is that… it’s poop!” We have seen our fair share of poop lately, but this was really small, non-human poop. And that’s something entirely different. Mice. Bleh! It was late that night, so I put a couple of the droppings in a bag so I could show my friends and the apartment management, and we went to bed with a modicum of trepidation. The next two days, we were doing things and got home or got around to thinking about that bag some time after the rental office closed, so it was actually Wednesday morning (shame on me!) by the time I got around to calling.
“Hi Glenda, it’s Kent Walter in 253. I’m good, thanks. Hey, um, it looks we have mice in our apartment. Or mouse droppings anyway. Or marmot or giraffe droppings for all I know. We haven’t actually seen the animal. But we have something in there, so I thought you’d want to know and maybe do something about it.”
The response on the other end was sort of like—and I tried and tried to find a video of this on YouTube or something—when Ralphie’s mom calls Flick’s mom in A Christmas Story to tell her what Ralphie said on the road. “He said WHAT?!” and then violent sounds of severe punishment. It was sort of like that. “You found WHAT?!” There has never been a rodent problem of any sort in any the apartments in our place, and the management is really proactive at keeping the neighborhood well maintained, so it was kind of a code red. The exterminator appointment was set for Thursday morning at 8:30, and Kirsten promptly made plans to vacate the premises.
I worked from home Thursday morning to greet the exterminatrix, who came on in and started looking around at a very punctual 8:29. She understood our shock at the audacity of any creature to come and hang out, uninvited, in our bedroom, and she had that glint in her eye, appropriate in only the most narrow of contexts, that told me she meant business. A look at the dropping we’d left on the stairs (it’s like crime scene evidence: you shouldn’t tamper if it might mess up the investigation), and she dropped a stunner: “I’m kind of concerned. Uh, these are rat droppings, actually.”
And these are Kent droppings.
Rats? Seriously? Not to insult anyone who actually lives in a tenement, and I’m grateful for every day I spend alive, let alone under a roof, but really? How was it (she said it was almost certainly “it” and not “they,” for which I was grateful) getting in? Where was it hiding? Was it still around? Was it going to nibble our toes? Was it a rather, you know, gregarious, gossipy sort of rat?
Now, you have to understand something about our apartment. It is not luxurious or anything, but it’s structurally sound, fairly modern, spacious enough for the three of us, and certainly not “aged” or “run down” in any way. It’s located well for us, and the management is fantastic. However—and this has been a big however for us—it is also very, very drafty and constantly cold. Our power bill was already approximately All The Money, and that was enough that we were planning on moving elsewhere when our lease ends in September. When I called and said the R word to Kirsten, she gave a mighty effort to regaining her composure and then immediately declared our apartment a dead zone into which she would no longer venture.
I’m getting bogged down in the details here. “And then she said… And then I told her… And then the rat…” The short version is this: by late in the morning on Thursday, I’d talked to Glenda, the apartment manager, and while we couldn’t get all the way out of our lease, she was willing to let us move to one of the two-bedroom apartment she had available. I left the eight rat traps behind (Side note: they were loaded with peanut butter and coconut oil. I was like, “Hey, remind me that that’s a rat trap in the middle of the night when I get the munchies, because I would even go for that.”) and began shuffling our things back and forth to the new place.
And that was the amount of advance notice on which we moved this past week. We had some help at different points (thanks to Mike, Carson, and especially Ryan!), and we didn’t have to box up anything or concern ourselves overly with protecting fragile items, so it wasn’t too bad. We’re in the new apartment now, seven doors down on the other end of the same building, and things are good. We had to leave Kirsten’s amazing nursery mural behind, which is a big, big drag, but the new place is good. So good, in fact, that I can very confidently say that this move was for the better. I’ll break it down:
Cons:
- We had to move, which means address changes, etc.
- The mural
But…
Pros:
- Warmer! Much better insulated! It feels like a proper building now!
- Much more sunlight (such as we have in the greater Seattle area in February) on that end of the building.
- The storage thing out front has shelves, which means floor space left and the ability to get my bike in and out without crazy acrobatics.
- The cabinet faces and countertops are newer.
- The water heater is either newer/more efficient/bigger, or it’s just turned up higher, but the hot water runs out much more slowly in the shower now. It’d probably handle two in a row.
- Same layout, just mirrored, which made arrangement pretty easy.
- The kitchen sink is deeper, which is a small thing that makes a big difference.
On the whole, quite a lot of good came of this. In fact, I’m sure I’m forgetting something up there. Providence strikes again, and here we are with yet another part of our lives to be very, very thankful for.
Also, the peanut butter/coconut oil concoction worked the first night it was there. I went over Friday morning to get something on the way out to work, and there was a burrito-sized monster with the trap flipped over onto him so I didn’t have to see his face. Very satisfying indeed.
