Dad was exercising in the basement when he saw the rat pop its head out from underneath the couch....was a tiny black rat....and before dad could react he ran back underneath....Well dad decided to ignore it and finish his exercising....he took a bath and came upstairs and after his coffee announced that he saw a rat in the basement....
Just then i came down to the living room and mom said that we immediately needed to evacuate the basement which was otherwise filled with all our clothes cuz apparently rats loved biting into clothes and making tiny lil holes in them.....yeah we had to clear the basement to save our clothes....and mind u mom said it was an emergency situation and no time could be wasted.
Well surprisingly nobody except me was worried bout rat bites that cause plague....i wonder why.The first time i was introduced to the word plague was when this disease was incurable and was the cause of an epidemic in pune.....i dont know if its curable today...must look up some medicle books sometime....but all i was worried about was Plague...cmon folks....we are supposed to be worried about plague...thats what ur supposed to do when there's a rat in the house...worry about plague....have i made myself clear over here??
So...to get on with the story....after the evacuation we obviously had to discuss in length as to how the rat could have possibly got in the basement....and in the process Dad ended up naming the rat as Jerry....so apparently Mr Jerry lost his way and came into the basement of 4649, County Creek. My Bil(Brother In Law) had to mention that he hadnt seen any insect, forget the rat, in his 15 (or i dont remember the number) of years he's lived in the US of A. After a lot of discussions, everyone just got to doing what they were doing prior to Dad's rat announcement....things came back to normal....dad went back to his comp, bil went back to singing ( he sings all day....never gets tired),mom went back to feeding the baby, my niece went back to watching the wiggles ( she watches all shows of the wiggles including the repeats everyday). My sis n me went out to the grocery store ( we go almost everyday cuz we dont make a list before goin to the grocers and forget at least one item each time we go).
Hmmm...things seemed normal when we got back from the grocers and parked the car in the clumsy shed....we walked in, my sister n me and guess what was awaiting us....yeah damn right u r....news about Mr Jerry...apparently my Bil had the rare opportunity ( out of context but my Bil pronounces the "Tu" in opportunity as "Tew" instead of "chew" which i find quite funny...most people dont but i do ) of witnesing the rare event of Mr Jerry hurrying cross the living room and under the orange couch.Hey...but wait a minute, this time things went a lil ahead of just discussing the event...so Dad and Bil had actually gotten mouse traps and filled them up with some cheese and had laid them near the couch and were hoping against hope that Mr Jerry would walk into one of those attractive traps.
Well...good job i would say.....so my sis and me stood there with frowning faces for a minute or two and then we decided that its time to get on with stuff...this time the stuff happened to be gorging upon the chinese noodles and fried rice which we had packed from the famous BangKok restaurant ( for the records my Bil doesnt like the food from here but we decided to pack dinner from this place anywayz cuz my sis says there is more variety here but i think she has difficulty in parking her big chrysler caravan at the other restaurants which would be more crowded owing to tastier food options). So just when my sis laid dinner plates on the table, Mr Jerry popped his head out again so my sister cud take one good look at him....and when she jumped and screamed in fright Mr Jerry ran back under the couch....
Ok now for the interesting part.....we all laughed at the way my sister yelled....but no one thought of turning the couch upside down right away and trapping Mr Jerry....maybe Dad and Bil were confident that Jerry would fall for the cheese and walk into the rat trap himself...well what can i say about men and their thoughts...they are always right...well so they think :)....Hmmm...i wouldnt blame them entirely for this decision considering that there was mouth watering chinese food on the table and 5 hungry stomachs....whats Mr Jerry in such a situation...nothing....yeah...nothing.
After dinner we all sat with r legs on top of the couch...careful not to leave even the end of our skirts lirking on the floor so that Jerry doesnt feel like running under any of them...especially cuz mom said these little rodents love biting into clothes...We watched a movie and went to bed....
Its only the next morning when we saw the rat traps empty thaat all of us realized that we had a serious situation....the rat was in the house somewhere and not in the trap where it was supposed to be....Sis was the first to hit the panic button...wish i had taken a snap of the look on her face...hahahaha....was like i have a dinosaur under my couch....so we all decided that we needed to get rid of Jerry ASAP....so while the men of the house ( the same men who had suggested rat traps with cheese) stood with broom sticks, the ladies ( i would say wonder women) upturned couches, moved tables, emptied closets and did everything else possible to find Jerry not to mention my lil niece mentioning every now n then that she saw jerry and making all 5 adults jump.
Well what can i say....after one whole hour of turning the house upside down...we couldnt find Jerry....We could have found him when we knew he was under the orange couch but we decided to let Jerry find a better hiding place so that real men and real wonder women can play a real game of hide n seek.Oh yeah i forgot to mention that the men of the house went to Home Depot and got bigger rat traps ( the ones that snap ) and laid them in the basement...yeah thats where we think Jerry is hiding.
