I wouldn’t mind the rat race…if the rats ever lost…
Super weird story, told in stream of consciousness, because I. Am. Just. So. Tired. and because writing is what I went to college for and used to do a whole lot of and sometimes still like to do but this somehow doesn't seem to have a home yet anywhere else (my blog, maybe?), and also because I haven't yet actually processed the amount of bullshit the Mister and I have been dealing with in this last little adventurous jaunt across Indianapolis...and somehow because stream of consciousness seems the only appropriate writing mode to do justice to...to...well, to THIS--
--so because of an unfortunate series of events involving multiple varieties of varmints and rodents, including but not limited to: raccoons, possums, feral cats, squirrels, mice, and...something else. so yeah, the raccoons were kind of funny, lumbering around in the attic, trying to reach through a drywall gap to get ahold of the dining area chandelier, rolling a glass bottle around in the ceiling, playing together, and hiding collections of marbles--yes, marbles, I don't know why or where they got them--in holes in the landscaping, but once the raccoons were caught and removed, we began hearing something else in the house with us, and our dogs were driving us nuts "hunting" all day every day, and at all hours of the night, visibly on the trail of SOMETHING in the walls and the attic and beneath the floors, making a terrible racket and holding all of us hostage,
a SOMETHING which eventually turned out to be be an entire city of rats (read: infestation of at least 6 basement burrows in the crawlspace, each potentially home to 5-10 rats, according to Eddie from Pest Control, who, by the way, "does NOT deal with dead rats, sorry" but who DID climb down in the basement for me because he felt sorry for us and get the one that I caught in that one trap and hand it to me to dispose of) and we didn't notice the burrows when we looked at the house originally, because they were hidden until the two dudes who came to work on the foundation after we moved in took out the staircase to the basement and exposed the crawlspace in the ancient little house on the near Eastside (removing a staircase, which they then left without replacing, so all of my basement and crawlspace recon work was done via a ladder with a flashlight) and so that is how we discovered the mysterious burrows which turned out to be a whole city of rats who pretty rudely evicted us from our rental home after what might have been the longest 8...or maybe 10...or maybe 12--I honestly don't even know how long we were there...days of my life, anyway, as I was saying. What was I saying?
Oh yes, we moved. Again. The rats had breached the ductwork, and were literally traveling through our home freely via the ventilation system, after chewing through the water line to the refrigerator ice maker, and building themselves quite a network of water troughs and burrows in the crawlspace, an endeavor that the pest control dude thinks took them a shockingly short amount of time to orchestrate and completely stage a takeover of the entire property to accomplish. Did you even know this was possible? Because we did not. And at first we thought (hoped and prayed and really really really wanted it to be chipmunks, and then mice, but definitely not what it was, which was rats and which we found out after I volunteered to traverse the basement alone to set sixteen traps [yes, sixteen, because FUCK OFF--I love animals, too. I cried when the raccoons were taken away, even though the dude said he was driving them way out in the country to release them, but I just don't know if I really believed him, and so I made them a meal of bananas, peanut butter, rotisserie chicken, and blackberries, which I fed them while they tried to attack me and eat my face off, pausing only for the rotisserie chicken, which was their favorite, and I hope they appreciated it because that was Whole Foods chicken, and that shit is expensive, and I fed it to them in the rain] but somewhere in here I've lost the correct placement point of the corresponding right parentheses...sorry) Okay, there it was. So...here's my stance on this--
I love animals. I do. But if I were to wander into the den of a lion, I would get killed, understandably. No one would blame the lion. Right? So when it comes to my house...I am the lion. It's just that simple. And I decide what does and does not get to enter our den. Usually. But here we were--and I'm here to tell you that the raccoons were just confused. They did not know they had wandered into the lion's den. Neither did the squirrels, the neighborhood tomcats. And the possum? I LOVE possums. We let him go. (Worth noting--he was the largest, stinkiest, most beat up and been-THROUGH-it possum I've ever seen, a city possum, in that neighborhood? I'm just sayin'--he's seen some shit, and we unlocked the cage and set him free, only for him to sit absolutely still, without moving a muscle, staring at us--so we shook the cage a bit and tilted it, to show him that the door near his ass-end? It was wide open. He was free. Eventually, we left him there with the trap open. Three hours later we went out to re-set the trap, and there that damned possum sat, still convinced he was stuck, with his ass end hanging out in the middle of freedom at midnight, and his nose pointing up at us without a clue in the world. We went to bed. He was gone in the morning, back under the neighbor's shed, where they told us he lives.)
Oh, and speaking of that neighbor--the previous weekend, they had fought and screamed at each other for six. solid. hours. The walls were paper thin, and our houses were close together. And I don't know what that man did, but that woman was MAD. And for six hours, we heard about it. They never got tired. They never came to blows (thank God), but they literally screamed for six hours, at which point, we gave up on our re-watch of Game of Thrones, turned our fan on high, and went to bed. The worst part? Their teenaged son turned up his bass-thumping music so loud that we couldn't tell what they were saying--so not only was it loud, but then we couldn't even figure out whose side we were on, and that seemed weirdly unfair. Ya know? I mean--WAS he serious?! She kept asking. But we couldn't hear the answer. And speaking of their son, the following day he and his buddy were outside, and one of them was so high that we had an entire conversation with him about the possum, during which he told us he had spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to spell "AirBnb" the night before and couldn't do it and kept getting re-directed to the license branch website when he Googled it. And..well...that was something.
Anyways...We got on the internet, found a new place, looked at it, applied, signed a lease, paid, got the keys, and moved in--all in less than about 18 hours. And we MOVED. Fast.
But the previous rat rental house was furnished, so we had moved all of our furniture to our French Lick house and planned to just stay in the furnished rental here, to eventually potentially rent out the French Lick house (to family and friends, via word of mouth only--no strangers allowed), so we moved, and then moved again, except the new place we are in now is NOT furnished, and our furniture is 3-ish hours away, and here we are-- living sparsely now in an unfurnished apartment (but free of all forms of varmints and rodents, and let me just tell you right now--Perspective is Everything, and I never imagined I could be so happy living in a mostly empty apartment with my husband, two dogs, one air mattress, my home office, two beach chairs, a therapy ball, two drum sets, several guitars, a digital piano, and a coffee pot...but here we are, happy as two people who really had no idea how much they hate rats and who also loathe the winter can be in a cold, mid-November kindasortasnowy week, trying to figure out what in the hell just happened to them and where to sit without a couch, though if you remember the early Florida days, this is not the first time your girl has been without a couch.
Did I mention that in the middle of all of this I started a brand new, fully remote, work from home job? Because I did. Somehow. I also voted. So don't ever tell me you couldn't make time to vote.
Yeah, here we are now across town on the south side of Meridian-Kessler (bonus news--we only have one block to walk to get to Whiskey Wednesday next Saturday--IYKYK)...
So tonight I sat down to do some work for the new business (not to be confused with the new job, which I do by day and LOVE SO MUCH, but the new business, which I do mostly by night and which I founded with four beautiful other women who are so badass and so talented that I'm in awe of them every day, and who have been REALLY patient with my flakiness for the last few weeks--also, you will all hear a lot more about this business "Indigo Jacks" when we get the website finished--but if you need development, communications, marketing, or public relations consulting for your business, your project, or your nonprofit in Indianapolis, Indiana or Jacksonville, Florida--you will be interested in this endeavor--what were we talking about again?)
So yeah, life has been kind of a shit show these last couple of weeks, but we have done what we do and put one foot in front of the other and laughed and prayed and meditated and snuggled our dogs and made lots of music in our home to cope and keep from losing our minds.
And tonight I sat down with my dinner at my laptop after some evening meetings and grabbed a thumb drive to save some documents and discovered that, somehow, some way, and who in the hell knows how, but in the course of one of our moves, I saw a thumb drive on the ground at our temporary literal rat-shit-house on the near Eastside of Indianapolis (there were two shootings within two blocks of our house there in the brief time we were there, and somehow that didn't even make it into the top three most stressful things that happened while we lived there, which was another reason we were not sorry to leave said house,) assumed it had gotten dropped when my husband and our new friend Dave from Task Rabbit (technically from the country of Brazil and not Task Rabbit, but we definitely met him through Task Rabbit--and he's pretty cool)--they were carrying stuff in and out, and I saw a thumb drive on the ground, and picked it up, and placed it in my office stuff, assuming it had been dropped by accident.
And tonight I needed a thumb drive, and I grabbed it and stuck it in my drive toggle thing-a-ma-bob, and I quickly realized it is not, in fact, my thumb drive at all. It belongs to someone VERY involved in meat. Yes, meat. Like, dead animals that you eat. Specifically, it is a thumb drive with LOTS of photos of cuts of meat and LOTS of tests and quizzes for the FFA from years 2014-2021 (except not year 2020, because pandemics--and did you know in the future that "because" is expected to morph into a stand-alone preposition, all because of Gen Z? It's true. You just watch. It's already happening...because internet)--so someone, somewhere is walking around wondering what the hell happened to their almost decade worth of FFA meat competition...stuff. Frankly, it's a pretty gross thumb drive, as far as the content of thumb drives go, but I'm just grateful it's not a mafia hit list or porn or some dipshit's drug dealing spreadsheets (do drug dealers use Excel? that would be something, wouldn't it? What about Quickbooks? I sure hope so. The future is now.)
So I'm worried whoever lost this thumb drive might need it. I also don't recognize any of the faces of any of the neighbors I met during the longest less-than-two-weeks-but-one-year-lease in rental history in any of the awards banquet photos on this thumb drive. And I'm wondering if Facebook can work its magic and reunite the meat-loving, FFA test-taking, thumb drive-misplacing person with what might potentially be an important item to them.
But here's my new concern--I don't want the thumb drive person attached to this post. Know what I mean? I don't want to make this public and then go through the rigmarole (definition: an explanation that is long, complicated, and tedious--how apropos here; in fact, that might be the BEST use of the word rigmarole I've ever personally seen, and I'm kind of proud of it) that is this post.
So, after all of this...I'm going to go make a new post about the thumb drive.
Bye.
Also, I'm going to go put this on my blog after all, because internet.
