Ratty has come to visit Tetra

With some pictures, not for the squeamish.

PICTURE the scene:

Me: “If there is any sign of droppings, I am out of there, okay?”
Tetra: *laughs* “As if, but sure….”

Famous last words as they say…

I promised Tetra this Saturday afternoon that I would help her gut and clean her flat after she found out she had a new and very unwelcome visitor, a rat.

Poor Tetra, she’s had an awful time lately with Ratty and her experiences have left us all experts on the life, needs and habits of your common, disease -idden and nasty rat.

It was about the time I was beginning to sun it up in Turkey, Tetra discovered she had a rat and promptly moved temporarily into her boyfriend’s flat, her flat was just not big enough for a visitor of that type.

Well when it a visitor of that ilk ever welcome…

Much phone calls, reading and research later, Tetra has learned that rats are nocturnal, would prefer outside where there are bins and therefore much more food to her flat where there is frig-all food, are neophobic (ie will not go near something that is new, no matter how delicious and tempting), pee as they go and shite up to 20 times a day.

Her boyfriend, a countryman, had told her previously that he thought she had a rat, however she dismissed him.

Then a week later she found droppings, panicked and phoned her apartment management company, when she got no answer she phoned a pest control company and her kight in shining armour turned out to be a butch woman called Pauline.

Pauline arrived to her rescue and took control of the situation, striding into the apartment with Tetra clutching her arm for comfort.

Traps were laid, the ones with the sticky stuff and off they went, Pauline to save another damsel in distress and Tetra to live temporarily with her country boyfriend.

A hole was discovered in the back wall leading to the pipe from her sink and this was believed to be the visitor's entrance, so it was promptly blocked up.

With there being more food for it outside, Tetra believed that, hopefully since two weeks had passed since it last desposited any evidence, it was now gone.

Believing that Ratty had just been wandering in once or twice in the hole from the bins outside, we ventured in to begin the clean-up operation.

We would go in, the traps would still be untouched and we could clean her life back to normality.

But Ratty has obviously had other ideas.

So it is now more than two weeks since the traps were laid and four days since they were last checked.

And they were empty.

Somehow the rat/s have managed to clear the traps of the bait and not get caught on the sticky stuff. (A feat which I managed to do while washing my hands uuurrrggggggggggggg)

So back to Saturday afternoon, in we walked to the flat, rubber gloves and protective clothing at the ready, ready to scrub every inch of the place, convinced the rat had not been back.


Some manic cleaning

We saw the traps were empty of bait and just looked at each other.

A couple of phone calls later we established that the country boyfriend had not moved them (why we thought he would do that, I don’t know) and somehow Ratty managed to eat them off the sticky trap and get away.

One of the traps had been overturned and somehow despite actually been stuck to it, Ratty got free.

Then we noticed Ratty had chewed part of wood underneath the cooker.



We SO wanted to just leave and we couldn’t for a while.

More phone calls to the pest people later and Tetra is out again for another couple of weeks.

Like Doris, I have had mice visitors and they are absolutely vile, horrible and urrggghhh but rats, oh yeuck, disease ridden horrible creatures.

My heart goes out to her so much at the moment.

And we weren’t the only ones having a tough Saturday, the poor Dubs lost out to Tyrone in the GAA football semi-final.

All around town you could see the red and white shirted Tyrone fans and the blue Dubs and most were smiling.





After a hard day's GAAing, and maybe a few pints, there's nothing better than a Burdocks Chip



Here’s one last picture, I took it on Friday morning going to work. I saw the graffiti on the hoarding in front of the GPO on O Connell Street, I took three shots, two had people walking right in front of the writing while the third was this one which I am happy with.

For the non-Irish visitors to the site, if you’d like to find out more about what it means, click on the picture to go to my flickr page explaining more.



(And to find out even more do a google search for Ireland 1916.)

Travelling down O’Connell Street today, the hoarding has already been painted over and the graffiti has gone.


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