Of Mice and Men

As of a week ago, we have an unwelcome addition to our home. No one (save Daughter) has set eyes on it, but evidence of its presence is turning up everywhere.

It started off with little bite marks on the apple and kiwis in the fruit bowl. We guessed that the little Phantom was a possum, and concluded that it had taken up residence in the roof (a fairly common occurrence in Australia) and found its way down into the house when hubby cut a hole in the ceiling for some DIY work. So we started hiding our fruit in the microwave and fridge, plugged up the hole, bought a possum cage online (the extra-big version at $44 a pop) and hauled it up into the roof cavity, using an apple as bait. Phantom accepted our offering, but evaded capture. Some cage! (We are now trying to see if we can get a refund).

Every morning for the next few days, I was greeted by the sight of poo (ie excrement) on the stove. Then I discover that it’s been chewing on the oven gloves I hang up near the stove. From there, it moved on to the kitchen floor rug, and a few days later to the rubber mat on the kitchen floor. With such a varied diet, we conclude that Phantom is no possum – he must be a rat. So I bring home another trap and some rat poison secured from my office groundsman, and set that up around the kitchen. Despite setting up an elaborate obstacle course for rodents, Phantom side steps both trap and poison, and continues taunting me with its droppings on the stove. So now, in addition to the human toilet I have to clean, I also have to clean Phantom’s toilet… every evening and every morning.

Emboldened by our feeble attempts, Phantom ventures further afield to the boys’ bedroom. I walk in there one morning to discover bits of B1’s $85 school bag on the floor. Turns out that B1 had a cookie in the outside pocket… since late last year! B1 denied any prior knowledge of the cookie, saying that a classmate had baked cookies for every person in class but that no one wanted it, and a friend must have put it in his bag without his knowledge, as a joke. To rephrase the well-worn excuse explaining why you didn’t complete your homework, B1 can now respond (with some truth) “The rat/mouse/possum ate my homework!” B1 thought this would be quite some story to share with his friends, but I wasn’t too keen, fearing the Department of Child Safety would remove all 3 kids from my care for being an unfit mother with a filthy home. Despite disposing of the offending cookie, Phantom revisited the bag and enlarged the hole, probably just to make sure that there were no crumbs left.

As last night was particularly humid, the family camped out in the only room in the house with air-conditioning – the living room. As we live in an open plan house, the living room, kitchen and dining room are in one big open area. We closed up all the bedroom doors, and were fairly sure that Phantom would remain in hiding for fear of detection. No such luck – he took another bite of the oven gloves, and we’re pretty sure he was in the air-cond unit (we had switched it off in the middle of the night) as we awoke to the sounds of scratching inside the unit. Hubby thinks he went there for a drink of water… or perhaps, like the rest of us, he was hot too.  

My research into the psychology of rats has revealed that they have what’s called “bait shyness”. They are naturally suspicious of anything new in the environment, and often won’t touch a bait until it’s been left there for several days/weeks. As for poison, it has to be slow acting – if it kills a rat instantly, the rest will know that it’s died from ingesting the poison, and they will stay away from it.

I don’t know how long more this will continue. The longer it drags out, the higher the chances are that he’ll destroy more things and (and this is highly likely) if there is more than one, they’ll breed and produce many more little Phantoms to drive us crazy.

The only thing that seems to work so far is B1’s schoolbag. I’m wondering if it’s worth investing another $85 in another school bag so that we can use the existing one as bait! But every cheapskate bone in my body is screaming out in protest – how can one (or God knows how many now) little pest cause so much damage?

Down but not out, Down Under

Since my last post on 12 December 2007, much has happened. My family of 4 emigrated to Australia in June 2008 (kids and I came first, Hubby came 6 months later after liquidating our meagre assets) and in December 2009, we welcomed our third child, a gorgeous boy. Between our arrival in Australia and younger son's arrival into the world, we held down 5 part-time jobs between the two of us, moved house three times and worked hard at building new friendships and understanding a whole new culture.

One of the first things we learnt about how things work in Australia was this: they don't, at least not in the Christmas holidays (although Christmas is technically on 25 December, the holiday period can stretch through all of December and January). That meant that Hubby couldn't secure any interviews upon arrival - people had better things to do (family holidays, DIY projects etc) than to think about expanding their workforce (and workload). He did end up getting a part-time job at a fish shop, but only because he accepted a lower rate of pay. The upside was that we ended up with lots of unsold fried food, although by the third day, I had tired of it and would gladly have traded it for fresh seafood instead!

Hubby's second job was in fact very similar to my very first job in Australia years ago when I was a student. This job involved dropping off shopping catalogues into letterboxes, then returning again after about a week to see if anyone had placed any orders, then forwarding the orders to the company, picking up stock and going back a third time to the relevant houses to deliver stock and collect payment. In a sense, it was harder work than what I did - in my case, I only dropped off the junk mail once a week and didn't have to deal with any orders or payment. I'd like to say that Hubby was rewarded handsomely for his efforts (trudging around in the hot Queensland sun with a big bag full of catalogues is hard work),but that would be a huge exaggeration. He did get fit, develop a tan and slim down a lot; so you might say that the work made him more handsome, anyway. He also made friends with elderly and mainly housebound Australians, who appreciated the magnified reading glasses, long-handled grabber tools, mobility aids and other assorted stuff the catalogue offered.

For a long time after he quit this job to start work in a position that made use of his qualifications and paid enough to support a family (ie a job which offered prospects and financial security), I still tried to look for little items to buy from the catalogue that was delivered to our house, hoping to help the person who was doing the job that Hubby once did. I finally stopped when I realised that most of the stuff ended up unused, adding to the clutter that seems to follow us everywhere we go.

Looking back, I have to say that it was a difficult time in our lives. Although we had some savings, the fact that Hubby felt unable to support his family placed him under emotional and mental strain. Because neither of us had full-time jobs, it was hard for us to be even considered for rental properties - weekends were spent dragging the kids to view one rental property after another, putting in multiple applications and ultimately being rejected.

One particular instance stands out in my memory. We had left the kids with my parents and gone to view a rental property on a street aptly named Lemon Street. The agent was late, probably because he thought there would be no takers for a property that was quite possibly not fit for habitation. It was an absolute dump! When he weakly apologised for his tardiness and the condition of the property, one prospective tenant replied "That's ok. I was looking at it as a place to house my dogs, cos they don't allow pets at the place where I'm currently staying!" Out of desperation, we put in our application anyway; and at that point, I wondered if this is what depression feels like.

On the way home, we were stopped by the police for speeding and copped a whopping fine (I can't remember the exact amount, but when you have no money coming in and the savings you have is whittled down to 1/3 thanks to a weak Malaysian ringgit, any amount is 'whopping').I remember thinking that this was a fitting end to the day, right before I was seized by an absolute certainty that we had hit rock bottom. And in that certainty came an immense sense of relief, because from now on the only place we could go was up!

Testing

Testing. Testing. I'm coming back from the dead after a 7 year break! Let's see how long this burst of activity lasts...