I awoke Sunday and while making my trek to the coffee pot, I encountered my youngest son who greeted me with, “We have a giant dead rat in the pool!”
Well, alrighty, then. I love you, too, son.
I squinted my eyes in an attempt to better process what that meant—for me. Unfortunately, the cogs to my brain clicked into place and reminded me that my husband, the official remover of dead things in our pool, is out of the country, the pool man won’t be here until the end of the week, it’s hot and we’re gonna want to use the pool before the pool man comes.
Damn!
Then it dawned on me. My youngest son, the barer of such fine news, was sitting at the computer. He wasn’t wearing swim trunks and didn’t seem to have been out by the pool yet. So that got me to thinking, and I asked, “Where’s your older sister,” thinking it was her that had discovered the offensive rodent in our pool.
Sure enough, my son said, “Oh, she was gonna go swimming with her boyfriend, but then they discovered the rat, so they went to his house to swim instead.”
What? Wait a minute. Why the hell didn’t they remove the rat?
I asked my son that very question, and he said, “Couldn’t find the net.”
Of course they couldn’t. Ugh!
With that bit of information, I continued my trek to the kitchen, hoping that a nice mug of coffee might make it easier for me to digest the concept that I was going to have to remove the dead rat. Of course, Murphy’s Law kicked into high gear, and I realized, much to my dismay, that my husband had used the very last of the coffee the day before and we were now officially coffee-less. Well, I was coffee-less. He was enjoying coffee in first class on his way to Europe.
Hmmm…. Things aren’t looking so good.
Not wanting to, but deciding I might as well get it over with, I begrudgingly went out to take a look at the dead rodent. Now, I’m not a huge fan of rats. They are a nuisance, nasty and generally distasteful. But I have to admit, as rats go, this one wasn’t half bad looking. It was black with a white underbelly.
Wasn’t aware that wild rats came in mixed color combinations.
If it wasn’t for the fact that it was dead and permanently frozen in some grotesque claws outstretched pose with its ears perked forward and whiskers sticking straight out, it might have been considered…cute…but just barely.
God! What am I saying? It’s a rat. And a dead one at that!
So there I was, no caffeine coursing through my veins, staring at a dead rat that had drowned and sunk to the bottom of the pool.
Great! Just great! And my daughter and her boyfriend are swimming in his non-rat-infested pool. Hmmm….
It was then that I made an executive decision—I would ignore said rat and go get coffee.
Perhaps I’ll see things in a more positive light once I’m caffeinated.
After getting my coffee, I returned home in a good mood and decided to continue to ignore the rat in my pool.
Not like it’s going anywhere, and there’s no sense ruining my sunny disposition by having to gag my way through removing its carcass.
I worked the remainder of the day and found myself at the house of my daughter’s boyfriend later that night. (His parents and we are friends.) I shared my rat situation with her, and how I wasn’t looking forward to having to use the pool net to get it out, since I knew, from past experiences, that its tiny claws would get stuck in the net, making it virtually impossible to shake it out of the net without having to get my hands near it.
Super ewwww!!!
My girlfriend smiled and said, “Oh, no bother. Just give it time. As soon as the gases kick in, the rat will float to the surface and be much easier to remove.”
Hey, there’s a great idea! So, I’ll wait. Then I can use a shovel and avoid the whole claws-getting-stuck ordeal.
And that’s what I did.
Today, I went out to check the status of the rat and was a little surprised to not see it. Searching the whole pool, I found it just as it was about to get sucked into our skimmer.
Ew! Can’t let that happen, then I’ll never be able to get it out without having to…gross…touch it! Good lord, can’t let that happen!
Looking around, I found a nearby fallen big stick and used it to…yuck…push the rat away from the skimmer. That gave me enough time to run to the garage and fetch a long-handled shovel with which I removed said icky rat.
Of course, it being a rat, it didn’t want to go peacefully. Every time I scooped it up on the shovel and then tried to lift it out of the pool, the rat would flop off the shovel and back into the water.
Dandy!
Then I’d have to use the end of the shovel to pull the rat closer to me, only to repeat the whole frustrating process again. (This, by the way, was before I’d had any coffee this morning.)
This is sooooo not the way to start one’s day!
Well, determined to outdo the rat, and driven by the desire to have a cup of coffee (or a few), I finally managed to get the damned rat out of the pool and dumped it into the trash with a satisfying thud.
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