The Rat and the Palmetto Bug

For one reason or another, we've stayed in Palm Springs longer than usual. This time it was for seven months instead of six. We're starting to conclude that the critters think that we're overstaying our welcome.

I've been trying to make our little mobile home nice and neat to come back to. It's an awfully cute one, having been added on to to make it look for like a Maine beach cottage. Whenever we leave for the summer, I go through the "pantry" drawer, where cans, cereal, sugar, and flour are kept. Just the day before, I had filled our sugar bowl, and put the rest of the sugar back in the drawer. Today, I saw that the plastic bag of sugar had been chewed through, and black rat poops, (larger than mouse poops), were all around it. I carefully threw away the sugar and cleaned up the evidence and industrially went about getting rid of any expired cans and sorting out any soups and such that we would take with us. Considering the drawer fully sanitized, I put back a few of the things I would pack along with a bag of flour in a zip lock freezer bag and set a rat trap that I found in the shed, arming it with peanut butter with sugar on top.

The next morning, I peaked in to check my trap, only to find that the flour bag that I idiotically trusted to be safe, was broken into, and the trap was sitting, untouched. I cleaned up That mess, and focused on the big deep drawer on the opposite side of the kitchen. It had been meant to be for foil, plastic wrap, and ziploc bags, and also baking pans, but had been carelessly taken over by plastic bags. Some came from the delivery of the Wall Street Journal,on a rainy day, and there was an amazing collection of plastic grocery bags. I always swear that I don't need them, since I bring my own reuseable bags to the store. I'm sure they must have been co-mingling and reproducing in that drawer!

I started with one of the skinny newspaper bags, and filled it with others to give to a friend to use when she walks her dog, and then tied a knot in each of the bigger ones like my mom used to do, and put it in another bag. Uh-oh. in the far back corner, there were shredded up bags, perhaps getting ready for a nice little rat's nest! I picked it all up with another bag over my hand and sanitized it with some Windex. I took out all of the baking pans and put them in the dishwasher, and figured out a new way to organize all of my rolls of foil, wax paper, etc, by standing them up in the drawer inside of a colorful reuseable bag. That way I can see exactly what I'm looking for by seeing the ends of the boxes! I felt very proud of this accomplishment, and then went back out to the shed to get another rat trap to set in this drawer. In the morning, when I unloaded the dishwasher, I arranged the cake and brownie and bread pans in the back of the drawer, trying not to hit the rat trap, which hadn't yet been sprung.

Oh! I forgot to tell you that the night before, I went into the kitchen to put one more glass into the dishwasher. When I turned on the light, I saw a startled looking Palmetto bug (a relative of the cockroach, but twice as big, but thankfully, they don't travel in packs).

He was standing with its legs up straight, looking almost embarrassed, on the counter. I decided to try to catch him like a spider, turned my empty glass upside down and pounced forcefully down on the formica. I lost! He was fast, and skittered off under a shelving unit!

The next morning, I made breakfast, and before I served it, decided to take the bowl of water that I keep in the sink out to water the last of our tomatoes. When I picked it up, hidden in the sink basket, was, I believe, the bug from the night before. I grabbed another sturdy glass and covered him up, went out to slosh the water on the bushes, and decided we should eat our breakfast before tackling the beast.

So, fortified, I approached the roach (Ha! Did you see that?), but he was still down in the metal basket. I resolved that I would have to try to kill him. I explained to Doug what I was doing, and he commented, "It sounds like you won't be going to Buddist heaven." I tried jabbing at him around the edges of the glass anyway with a long knife. I didn't hit him, but he managed to get up to the flat area of the sink. I still had him trapped under the glass. I went to the recycling basket and fished out an appropriate political ad that proclaimed that this Republican was endorsed by Mr Trump, and had a big smiling image of him on it. I opened the front door in preparation for my quick departure, placed the cardboard next to the overturned glass and slid it under the bug. I carefully held the politician's face tightly under the glass, and walked quickly out the door. I wanted to release him away from the house, so I brought him out to the street and put him in the gutter. He ran, uninjured, to safety.

A little later, I needed to pick up something at the store. As I pulled the car away from the curb, a mockingbird flew down to the street in front of me. He was chasing and pecking at, of all things, a Palmetto bug!! The bug was fast, but the bird was persistent. Suddenly, the bug flew! But the Mockingbird, being in his element, caught him in mid-air! He landed across the street on the sidewalk and was soon joined by his mate seeming to congratulate him on bringing home dinner. It turns out that my neighbor has a mockingbird nest in his bougainvillea bush.

Before we left, a friend came over with a couple of outdoor rat traps, and we wandered around the house to try to see how a rat might get in. We found a couple of spots and left them there. Everything seemed secure, since we had been also battling a skunk that wanted to move in under our home a few months ago. Stones have been placed all around the rim where there isn't already cement. I found something called peppermint balls on Amazon, which seemed to repel those beautiful, but hugely stinky creatures, along with placing red rope lights around what seemed to be their favorite point of entry. They'll be on night and day all summer. Skunks don't like lights. We tried everything, even orange peels and rosemary....strong scents that repel them. After about 3 weeks of finally not waking to the pungent smell in the next room, we finally felt we were done with skunks.

So now we have the battle of the rat and the Palmetto bugs. We'd done all we can, so as we left, we said a little blessing on our home, even as the daddy longlegs spiders seemed to already be making new cobwebs as we walked out the door. Oh well. We'll call to have someone help clean when we get back in November, and in the meantime, the critters might have their place back for the summer.