My mom left town this morning. Today was the real start of me being a mother of three. You know, where I actually do it by myself during the day. *GULP*
While my mom was still here, she bought some steaks for us to grill this last Wednesday. These were Costco steaks. So, needless to say, we were pretty excited to eat them.
M got home from work and fired up the grill. We got the four huge steaks cooking and then we noticed something down inside the grill next to the burners.
Rat poison.
Last year we didn't actually get to eat any of the tomatoes from our garden because something was getting to them before us. And since I saw a rat along our back fence once when we first moved into this house, I'm betting the culprit was rats. Pleasant thought, no? I suppose it could be squirrels, but what's the difference really? Squirrels are practically rats with bushy tails.
After we lost two bell peppers in the garden this year, M decided to try some rat poison. M and Scott came back from Home Depot with it and the first thing Scott announced as he burst through the front door was, "Mom! We bought rat food!" That's right Scott, we bought those rats the only kind of food we want to share with them. M put out three little chunks and two chunks disappeared. I guess some little critter wanted to eat his poison lightly tossed with rancid grill fat. When it had its fill, it decided to leave its little "treat" inside the grill for safe keeping. That is, until (hopefully) it keeled over and never returned! Bwa ha ha!
Hmmmm... wonder where the third chunk of poison went? (Please let the rat have taken it home to its friends. Please let the rat have taken it home to its friends. And please don't let it turn up somewhere like inside our Brita pitcher. I have this nagging fear that in reality our neighborhood has super-intelligent evil rats that escaped from some science experiment gone awry and that are now trying to exact their revenge by poisoning people. "My name is Ratty McRat. You killed my father. Prepare to die.")
But the steaks. Ah! I weep for those steaks. Considering the warning labels on that rat bait (Can you say cerebral edema?), there was no choice but to throw those neurotoxin smoked beauties away and scramble for something else to eat. I WANT to be ready to laugh about this. Not sure I'm there. I think I'll go caress our steak knives and sigh wistfully some more.
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UNRELATED UPDATE: I snagged Kate's umbilical stump yesterday with my hand while doing a diaper change and that sucker just popped right off. Phew! Not too bad. In the end it took 23 days to fall off (or get accidentally pulled off - po-tay-to, po-tah-to). I knew complaining to the wwworld would do the trick. There was a tiny bit of bleeding, but nothing that wasn't a "variation of normal."
This post is really funny to me because we just watched part of Ratatouille today. And the little short film "The Life of the Rat" (I think) where they tell the history and make a plea (through song) to live peaceably with the rats. I'm sorry your steak was ruined--that really stinks!
ReplyDeleteAs part of my chores, my mom would sometimes assign me to put out the rat poison to kill the packrats that lived in the desert in front of our house. I was rather successful. However, we had to clean up the huge rat nests once we killed them. While trashing all the sticks and cacti that made up a nest one day, I found one of my missing Ninja Turtles. (Donatello, my favorite, of course) I'm not sure how the rat managed to drag something twice its size all the way from the back yard to its nest. Anyhow, that rat got what he deserved for stealing my toys.
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