Cheese? Puhlease.

A rat ate my banana.  Honest.  We’ve been finding interesting droppings in our house lately.  In my mind they were mice.  After requesting dropping detail, our friend assured us they were not.  Ack.

Since moving here, I have acquired a fear of leptospirosis.  I’d never even heard of it, but apparently people here do in fact contract it - and die.  Rats and mice are carriers.  If your kid pops a dropping, watch out.  Joselyn’s son’s neighbor found a mouse nest in his shoe.  He dumped it out.  Whacked the baby mice.  Shook out the dust.  And put his shoe on.  The next weekend he died.  Leptospirosis.  This all sounds a bit urban legend to me, but supposedly it really happened.

Anyhow, we are now in rat-prevention mode, which is hard since the zone we live in is overrun.  You can’t even set a normal trap.  Cheese, peanut butter, puhlease.  They have to use meat as bait here.  Seriously.

We broke off the tree branch touching our balcony.  Rats here live in the trees.  Who knew?  I set a huge chlorine bottle on top of the only un-covered floor drain.  We take all the garbage out every night.  However, our apartment is still fairly open.  Then Andy read online that mice and rat hate peppermint.  Supposedly peppermint oil (not extract) is the magic natural rat remedy.  Hooray!  Far better than cat urine pellets or similar.  So we procured a bottle from the U.S. and are placing it around our balcony doors.  We’ll let you know if it works!