There's A Rat Among Us

This is not a humor blog, although from time-to-time you'll find some humor. The story I'm about to tell you is completely true and maybe a little bit funny.

You may recall that on Saturday, Grandad and I undertook the cleaning and de-cluttering of our garage. Like most suburban homes in South Texas, we have a two-car attached garage. We use it primarily for storage and I park my car inside. Before Saturday, there was so much clutter that I could just barely fit my mid-sized SUV in it. Lots of stuff gets stored in the garage including the lawn mower, weed-eater, Christmas trees, outdoor holiday decorations, Grandad's tools, fishing equipment, just to name a few. It also serves as the collection point for anything to be donated or sold. Our bicycles used to be stored there until they were stolen a couple of months ago, when we carelessly left the door open one night.

We used to be really good at cleaning it once a year and making a donation to Goodwill and/or having a garage sale. But in the five years that Grandad was sick, we've not been able to get it done. A lot, and I do mean a lot, of stuff has amassed there. There was so much that we didn't know where to start. We just dove in and started.

We worked for several hours and got a lot done. We filled both our trash can and our recycle bin to the point of overflowing. There were several domestic accidents that mostly included broken glass. There were no injuries, so it was okay.

After 36 years, I have come to realize that I am married to a potential hoarder. If I let him, Grandad would keep EVERYTHING! He comes by it honestly. It took several days and several collection bins the size of 18 wheelers to clean out his Dad's shed.

My Father-In-Law's shed

 I have decided that we've just got to have some rules.

• We now have a plastic cabinet with three large drawers to hold "shop rags." He can keep all the rags that will fit in that cabinet and no more. Any more than that must go into the trash.
• We will only keep a limited number of pieces of plywood. He probably has 15 different scraps of various sizes of plywood leftover from various projects. They have been in the garage for at least ten years without being used. Plywood is readily available and not expensive. We will no longer be storing plywood scraps in our garage.
• Dangerous and poisonous substances that are stored in the garage must be moved to a safe place. We often have little ones here, therefore everything must be moved out of reach of little hands.
• We will get rid of all the stuff that we've been saving to use for nonspecific projects, especially those that have been waiting for several years.

We made a lot of progress, but we only got about halfway done. Sometime around 3 p.m. things went horribly wrong.

We moved a cabinet from one side of the garage to the other and in doing so uncovered a stack of posterboards. I was kind of happy to see them, because some of them were the signs we used for our last garage sale. All we have to do is darken them up a little and I won't have to make new signs. So I picked them us and stacked them to one side and turned back around to see what was on the other posters. I picked up the next one and behind it was a rat ... not a mouse ... a rat ... a big, black rat. It actually hissed at me. I screamed and ran out the garage door into the yard. The rat ran through the kitchen door into the house and ultimately into our bedroom. Grandad attempted unsuccessfully to close the kitchen door, thereby keeping the rat out of the house. Instead, he bumped into two 8 feet long glass shelves that had been destined for the garage sale, causing them to crash and fall onto the concrete floor and explode into millions of pieces.

Grandad pursued the rat into the house where he found it under our bed against the back wall of the house. In a flash of genius (?) Grandad decided that he should just shoot the rat with a pellet gun. I suggested a shotgun, but he thought that would be too messy. Grandad closed and sealed all the doors thereby trapping the rat in the bedroom and went next door to borrow a pellet gun. Meanwhile, I camped on the swing in the front yard.

He returned 20 minutes or so later, with not a pellet gun, but with a bb gun. While I stayed on the swing, he went in and started shooting. He did manage to hit the rat several times, but not enough to kill it. So now we had a bleeding rat in the bedroom. When Grandad came out of the bedroom, the mouse hid. At this point I decided to go buy a rat trap. I made a quick trip to HEB and returned with a very large trap and peanut butter. We set the trap, closed the door, and waited. Nothing happened. Around 7 o'clock, Grandad went and bought sticky traps and placed them around the room, also baited with peanut butter. He spent quite a long time looking for the rat and could not find it. We picked up something for dinner and continued to wait.  Around 9 o'clock I announced that I would be sleeping on the sofa, Grandad said he'd take the recliner. I had Grandad get me a pair of pajamas out of our room and I went to the bathroom on the other side of the house for my shower. Grandad bravely decided to shower in the master bath. While he was in the shower, the rat emerged and got stuck to the sticky trap. More precisely, the mouse's back feet got stuck. His front feet were still on my floor. He was so big that he was dragging the trap around the bedroom.

Grandad ran to the garage and grabbed a shovel and a box. He had to whack the mouse a couple of times with the shovel to knock him out, because he kept running, with the sticky trap attached. He was approximately 9 inches long, not counting his tail. We both breathed huge sighs of relief. Neither of us was looking forward to sleeping in the living room. But mostly neither of us was happy about sharing our home with a 9 inch rat.

We have now moved the sticky traps to the garage. Hopefully, he doesn't have any brothers or children.

Grandad has taken the day off tomorrow and again on Wednesday to work on finishing the garage and getting it ready to set up for a garage sale on Saturday.

We Have Too Much Stuff

I'm still on my clean out and de-clutter crusade around the house. Today's target was Nick's room, more precisely, Nick's closet.

Nick graduated from high school in May of 2000, then left for college in August. After that he came home for summers, and then he lived at home for about eight months after graduation until he found a job. For the most part, he's been gone for more than ten years now. But the problem is, he never completely moved out. Oh sure, he's married and has a house of his own (which is more than twice as big as ours), but he's never really moved all his stuff. It's like he's trying to keep a foothold here in case he ever needs to come back home.

My question is ... do they every really move out? Don't get me wrong ... he's gone, but his stuff is still here. And by stuff, I mean clothing that he hasn't worn in many years, shoes and boots that he occasionally wears when he comes home to go hunting, college textbooks and notes, photos of his high school friends, the suit we bought him for job hunting, a catalog case from his first job that he can't remember the combination to unlock, notes from a basketball camp he went to in 1996, assorted trophies and medals from high school sports, both high school and college letter jackets, a beautiful onyx chess set that has never been taken out of the box, and a variety of other "stuff."

Now, in all fairness to Nick, we also found a bunch of other stuff that we had just been cramming into his closet for the past ten years or so. I had stored pillows, mattress pads, quilts, blankets, picture frames, books, a picnic basket, stacks of magazines, a bunch of clothes that Grandad has outgrown, a briefcase, several overnight bags and suitcases, boxes of memorabilia from the kid's school years, a pair of lamps I want to rewire, and assorted other "stuff."

In short, even though I've been working on it for months, we still have too much "stuff" all over the house. Next up on the clean out list is my craft closet and then the closet in Katy's room. My goal is to get it done this week and have a garage sale within the next couple of weeks. My real goal is not to end up like those people on Hoarders. None of this stuff is coming back into my house. Anything that doesn't sell goes to Goodwill.

"Anyone who has ever cleaned out a closet and taken stuff to Goodwill knows how liberating it is. You feel lighter, your mind feels clearer." - Cecile Andrews

Taking Control Means Getting Organized

Grams has now spent the last two days cleaning out our four-drawer file cabinet. It has not been cleaned out in many years ... actually, it's never been cleaned out since we bought it quite a few years ago. Just to make that point, I'll admit that among the things I found in it were our tax returns from the 1980s along with a lot, and I do mean a lot, of bank statements.

The end result was four 33-gallon trash bags of shredded paper, a dead shredder (may it rest in peace), and a stack of papers that need to be organized and put back into the file in some kind of meaningful order.

Besides my personal need to take control, a big part of the reason Grams decided to undertake this purging process is so that, when Grandad and I pass into the great beyond, our kids won't have to deal with as big a mess as we had to when our parents passed.  To that end, I spent the morning perusing web sites that offer advice about what families need to know when a loved one passes and how to organize personal files.

There are a great many internet resources about this subject. Some of them are free and some of them are kind of pricey. The most thorough guide I found was from the Career Transition Center of the U.S. Department of State. It's 46 pages long and can be downloaded in an Adobe Acrobat file. If you're interested, you can find it here. But that was a little bit more detailed than I needed. I pulled information from about a dozen web sites and have compiled this list that I'm going to use for creating my files. I suspect that it will evolve as I actually set it up, but these are my starting categories and what will go in each one.

• Personal Data (one file for each family member) to include birth certificate, Social Security Card, copy of driver's license, and passport.
• Medical Records (one file for each family member) including a copy of health insurance cards, contact information for each doctor, allergy information, and medical records.
• Life Insurance including location of policies, amounts of coverage, and contact information for all agents.
• Academic Records including transcripts, diplomas, financial aid/student loan information.
• Tax Returns for 3 years including all supporting documents
• Automobiles including titles (originals and copies), automobile insurance, registrations, spare keys, and contact information for insurance agent.
• Home including location of deed, mortgage, location of homeowner’s insurance policy, claims information, contact information for insurance agent, floor plan, breaker schematic, pest control records, etc.
• Financial including the location and account numbers for all accounts, passwords, specifics of each account (joint or individual), and contact information for investment accounts.
• Bills/Credit Cards/Loans with copies of most recent bills/statements.
• Warranty Information with receipts, warranties, and owners manuals on all major purchases.

Hopefully Grams will finally be able to get a handle on our personal record-keeping.  I will update you as this project moves along.