Rudolph The Rat

So, we have a Christmas rat in the house.  I've named him Rudolph, in the spirit of the season.

Artistic interpretation of Rudolph, except not.  It's just a random Christmas rat picture I stole from Google Image Search.

Sorry for stealing, The Dapper Rat.

He got in a few days ago.  I know, because I'm a complete night owl so I was the only one awake all night to see him.  And I saw him all right, because he was freaking all over the place.  First I heard something moving in the kitchen from my seat in the living room, so I get up and walk down the hallway just in time to see a dark thing scurry across the way from the kitchen door to dad's office.  "Okay," I think to myself, "So we have a mouse."  No biggie.  We live kind of far back from the street, a little into the woods, so we get mice on a regular basis.  Especially in winter when they are looking for someplace warm and full of food to snuggle up in during the cold weather.  In fact, we'd just gotten rid of a mouse or two in the past week with sticky traps.  Personally, I hate the things; I can't stand hearing mice squealing in terror when they're trapped in one, and pretty much all you can do with sticky traps is either crush the mouse to death (we use wine bottles) or, if the poor thing is unlucky, you don't notice it's there so it dies of thirst over a period of days, all the while struggling and screaming and biting at itself in a futile attempt to escape.  Unfortunately they are easily the most effective type of trap.

Anyway, I thought nothing of it at first, but Rudolph wasn't exactly shy, so I realized pretty quickly that it wasn't a normal mouse in the house.  I caught another glimpse of him as he ran behind a cupboard later, and I thought "That seems to be a bit bigger than your average mouse."  Later on I'm back in the living room, sitting on the sofa with my laptop on my lap, and I see something out of the corner of my eye.  I look up just in time to see his tail flash by in the gap between the garbage can and the chair; it's long, dark, thick and held at least an inch off the ground.  I don't know a lot about rats, but as an animal lover I've happily played with friends' pet rats and none of them seemed that big.  But it was most definitely a rat's tail.  Next time I go into the kitchen, I see his adorable ratty face poking out from behind a bag before he takes off.  Later on I get a properly good look at him (and he is huge) when he climbs up onto the tv stand to explore...about five feet away from me.  I guess he figures that as big as he is, he can take anyone, especially the short person on the sofa.  To be fair, he probably has a point.

Anyway, clearly something must be done before Rudolph starts feeling at home.  I spent most of that night chasing after every noise I heard with a bit of pipe in my hand, stomping and shouting at him.  I have no idea how my family slept through it.  I didn't have any proper rat traps, but I had a few mouse-sized sticky traps so I was hoping they could do the trick.  No luck.  I set one behind the bag and in front of the drawers, where I saw him before, and not fifteen minutes later I hard thrashing and the bag rustling in the kitchen.  But when I get there the bag is already knocked over and the trap gone.  I pull out the drawers (they are a plastic set on wheels, we are theoretically still renovating the kitchen) and yep, it was hauled underneath them, no rat inside.  Damn.  Later on, when I catch him trying to go at the big garbage bag (successfully tearing it all to pieces before I can chase him off) I take the ineffective trap and put it by the bag to ward him off, using his freakishly large intelligence against him.  We both know the trap won't actually stop him...but he knows it is a trap.  It must have worked, because he stayed away from the bag after that.  The next day I go to Canadian Tire with Dad and we buy half a dozen rat traps.

The big ones.

We set two as soon as we got home, then promptly lost the bag.  Grammy was spending the night that night, so I stayed up later than usual (or rather, as late as I normally do, but intentionally this time) both to be around to help her if she needed it and to listen for Rudolph and keep him from eating my sleeping grandmother's face Compsognathus-style should he show up.  I heard him rattling around a lot and I think I caught a glimpse of him once or twice, but nothing like the night before.  The next night my brother Sandy hears him; he was int he front of the house, and I was in the living room at the back.  He comes tearing down the hallway like a shot and vanishes into his bedroom, bellowing "MOM SAID I COULD!"  I figure out what he's talking about when he comes out and runs off with a bow and arrow; clearly a Rudolph situation.  I haven't got the pipe at hand this time, so I grab the death stick (an electrified tennis racket I use for flies, a gift from my mother last Christmas) and follow behind.

We don't catch Rudolph, because rats are quicker than people looking for weapons to kill rats with, lucky for them.  But we do find the Canadian Tire bag with the rat traps in it, so we set a bunch.  Two around the front of the house, where we keep hearing him.  One behind the silverware drawer, where I saw him that one time.  One in the attic where Sandy thinks he heard him and where we found a dead bird that Rudolph may or may not have been eating.  One in the bathroom behind the tub, where my parents think he might have gotten in by squeezing around the pipes.  One underneath the record player; I haven't seen him over there yet, but mice like that area as we've caught a few in the sticky traps below there, so we might luck out with Rudolph.  I feel like there's another one or two that I have forgotten, but I don't think there actually are.  I'm just imagining things.  Anyway, we rat-proof the house as best we can and post a list of the traps on the fridge so nobody breaks a finger digging too deep in the food cupboard under the microwave and go to bed.  The next day when I get up somebody's scribbled "RAT IN BATHROOM TRAP" but I checked and the trap has been sprung but there's no rat in it.  I think he set it off and someone heard that and wrote it down without checking to see if it actually got him.

I am hoping we catch him before Christmas.  I don't want Rudolph getting into and ruining my Christmas candy or anything.  Sandy had to get rid of his Christmas stocking last year because a mouse chewed a hole in it.  Not during Christmas, I mean, but over the summer when he had it put away.  And Dad is already sick of dealing with rodents getting into the garbage box down the driveway and ripping the garbage bags up and spreading trash everywhere, we would rather keep that out of the house if at all possible.  If we do catch him I will post updates and possibly pictures, if I ever find my camera cable to connect to the computer so I can actually take my photos off the camera!

FUCK YEAH KITES

I went on a kite-flying picnic thhe other day!  It was awesome.  I skipped work and went downtown on the bus with a bottle of pepsi and a box of cookies and two dollar-store kites, and met Tom near some park-like thing.  He brought his fantastic sandwiches and some mangoes and a hot chocolate from Coffee Matters, perfect picnic things.  His sandwiches are really amazing lunchfoods.  He gets a fresh baguette or ciabatta bread or something, and some nice cheese to slice onto it, and some nice thick slices of pepperseed salami and sandwiches it up.  It's really simple, but amazingly yum.  I should have taken a photo to post, but they are so good I couldn't stop eating to grab a camera.  Or rather my iPod, since I've lost my charger and made my camera into an expensive paperweight.  I gotta find that thing.  Or get a new one.  Where the hell do you go for a new camera battery charger?

Anyway.  Nummy picnic on a park bench!  I forget which park, but there were lots of pretty trees around and nice flowers everywhere and a bajillion ants and everybody who walked by had an adorable dog and I just wanted to feed each and every one, but I didn't want to share the sandwiches so I didn't.  We fed the ants some mango, though, because it's really hard to keep a grip on a mango when you're cutting it on your lap without a board or a table or anything.  Mangoes are yum.  I didn't know I liked them until Tom showed them to me.   I should eat mangoes more often.

After the picnic we had to find a new park, because Tom had not realized there were quite this many trees until we came here with kites.  So we started walking!  We wandered the mean streets of St John's until we could find a suitably kite-friendly patch of land.  We would have walked for hours if necessary, though I would have complained ever step of the way.  But we didn't need to walk for hours, we just had to walk for ten minutes or so until we got to The Rooms.  The Rooms, along with all its fantastic displays inside which I will talk about another day because we went there and I took pictures of the giant squid and it's fantastic but it's not the point of this post, also has a very large grassy front lawn with no powerlines overhead and hardly any trees at all.  Perfect for kite flying!

Like I said, we got our kites from the dollar store.  I picked a lovely large parrot-shaped kite and Tom got a traditionally diamond-shaped kite with fighter plane jet things all over it.  Before we went out we agreed that Tom's kite would probably fly better, because after all kites are traditionally diamonds, right?  It must be the best kite-shape if that's what they're all like.  And while we were putting our new kites together on the lawn of The Rooms, it certainly seemed that way.  Tom's kite was much easier to put together than mine, the clip thingy on mine was bent so I had to pretty much break my kite and put it back together to make it work.  But once our kites had been assembled, it turns out that my parrot (whom I decided to name Percival) was a natural flyer, and his wings caught the breeze easily and took him delightfully high up.  Alas, Tom's kite must have been afraid of heights.  It wouldn't go more than five or ten feet off the ground and only flew in dizzying loops before crashing to the ground again.  But it was still lots of fun!  I flew my kite for ages while little children running around turned green in envy, and Tom flew his kite in loop after loop after loop until his string clip broke and his line became hopelessly tangled.  Then, because I was very nice, I let him fly Percy!

He proved to be a much more skilled kite-pilot with a working kite.  While he showed off his skills, I went to his goofy kite and tried to untangle it to see if I could fly it, because to tell you the truth those loopy-loops looked kinda fun.  So I only had half an eye on Tom and Percy, and when I looked away, tragedy struck!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO PERCY COME BACK

It was inevitable, really.  Percy crashed into the ground, as kites are wont to do now and then, and his poor cheap dollar-store string-holder broke, so he got free.  Being the excellent flyer that he is, the wind caught him easily and he flew away, loose into downtown St. John's.  I hope he did not land on anyone's car windshields.  That's why I don't have any close-up pictures of Percy, by the way.  I was gonna take some after getting tired of flying him so I could show the world how pretty he was, but you can't take pictures of a kite that isn't there.  Sorry, my fellow kite-fanatics.  You will just have to take my word for it, and also maybe the far-away pictures where Tom is flying him.

But the loss of Percy wasn't the end of the world!  Birds are meant to fly free, after all, and with no more working kites Tom and I went to get some Chinese noodles, because we were right next to one of my favourite Chinese restaurants (Mea Mei Wok Eatery!) and noodles are delicious, and then we went to....THE GEO CENTRE.  Fuck yeah!  I love that place.  I haven't been since I was a little kid!  And it's just as rad as I remember.  There was the Titanic room and the rock wall with the spray bottles and there was a room about oil and stuff and all kinds of geology!  Awesome geology!  The Canada guide from Lonely Planet described the Geo Centre as an interesting way to learn about stuffy boring geology, but fuck that book because geology is always amazing.  

And then the next day we went back to The Rooms!  But I'll save that for another blog post because hey, if I tell everything all at once what am I gonna blog about then, huh?

Mardi Gras on George Street

So I went down to George Street the other night for Mardi Gras!  It's not real Mardi Gras, though.  That's in February or something.  In St John's Mardi Gras just means Halloween Party.  I don't know why.  It's kind of confusing.  I mean, why steal somebody's holiday if you're not even going to pretend to do that holiday?  Just call it Halloween on George Street, seriously.

But anyway.  Costumes!  This is the first year in a while I actually did a costume, instead of just throwing on some awesome stuff I had lying around.  I went as Wesley from The Princess Bride!  Well, sort of.  The Universe was pretty insistent on me being Stripper Wesley, because when I went to look for a shirt the only ones I could find with the right sleeves were transparent.  The only non-see-through shirt I could find was too small for me, so I couldn't do up the top button properly and my cleavage was pretty visible.  Looked good though.  Not Quite Stripper Wesley is a good look for me.

It was a quick and cheap costume, for the most part.  I already had the sexy boots, and most of it I bought at Value Village.  Except for the leggings.  They were surprisingly expensive, but at least I was allowed to try them on.  I've been burned by leggings before.  You gotta be careful when you buy them, because a lot of the time they are labelled leggings when they're actually just footless tights.  You know what the difference is between leggings and tights?  You can see your underwear through tights.  Always check your leggings for underwear sightings.  And wearing dark panties helps too.

I'm on the phone with Shannon in this picture.  He asked for photos.  You're welcome, Shannon.

I went to Mardiween with Petron, because his friends ditched and Sam didn't have money to get in and then when she could get in she had a headache from shitty glasses, and Ash had to work but she showed up later anyway because she's cool like that.  Petron was a blogless mad scientist with a tube of glowy worms.  It was pretty cool, he did it by sticking a couple of glow sticks in a jar of milk and water.  Then he dropped it and the top cracked, but it still worked.  The seal didn't break so no milkwaterglow spilled anywhere. But he kept rolling it all over the table, because he never learns.

We went down around seven, because that was the only time I could get a ride.  It is unfortunate, because the weather was crap so most people either didn't go, or waited until nine or ten to show up.  Including Ash, who didn't get off work 'till eleven.  So Petron and I were kinda stuck on the street waiting for hours and hours for it to get interesting.  We passed the time by calling random people, getting food at Greensleeves, and trying to harass our friends into showing up.  Also I called Shannon, because Shannon is cool and apparently my phone does reach Clarenville when it wants to, and every other time I've tried to call people in Clarenville it was just being a wuss.  I don't know how a phone can be a wuss.  Probably by being too wussy to call numbers.  Thanks, phone.

But it got cool eventually!  Later in the night people in cool costumes showed up, like the Lego Batman people and the Adventure Time characters.  I didn't get photos of them though.  I should have.  And Ash came down dressed as a mob bitch/mobster/mob boss/person in rad outfit.

After Ash got there, we switched it up!  Instead of wandering aimlessly all over the street like we had been doing, we started wandering aimlessly all over the street and dancing in one of the bars.  Took photos, made fun of people, got photos interrupted.  Seriously, don't bother trying to do a posed photo around drunk people, they think it is hilarious to jump into it.

Petron went home at around one or one thirty, and Ash and I went to another bar and made new friends, Doctor Who, Po the Teletubby and a Free Mammogram machine.  Ironically, Doctor Who was the only one without a sexy foreign accent.  And yes, I know technically he is The Doctor, but face it everybody calls him Doctor Who.  Even the show does it.  Calm your tits.

Also what the heck is the deal with stuff on George Street.  You have to pay twenty bucks to get on the street, and they give you both a ticket and a wristband, but if you leave the street you can't get back on?  What the hell is the point of the wristbands?  Either use the wristbands to say "You have already paid for your ticket and been on the street, so if you leave this is proof that you can come back," or don't bother with the fucking wristbands in the first place, what the hell.

But we stayed on George Street till last call, me and Ash and Tom of the Free Mammograms and Po the Drunk Teletubby, and after that we went down to a really cool little bar with a nice atmosphere and stays open serving alcohol past the legal hour, lets you smoke in the bar, and never cards anyone.  I love that place.  I don't smoke and so far I've always had my ID, but it's cool to know that there's a place like that to go if I am hanging with underage smokers at three am for some reason.  Then we went to Celtic Hearth and stood around waiting in the rain for like half an hour waiting for a table.  Po ditched us to join a group of strangers who got a table before us, and vanished into the night like a mysterious wasted ninja.

So overall it was a pretty rad night.  Well, half and half.  The first half was kinda lame, but only kinda.  Petron is awesome to hang with, and we got some decent food.  The second half was rad as fuck, despite a lack of Petron.  I have no idea how I spent as much money as I did, but whatever I spent it on was probably worth it.  It was a good night.

I spent too much money today :(

So today I went to the mall!  I was supposed to go with Sam, and head up to Value Village to look for a Halloween costume, but she was a butt and decided to feel sick today.  So the Halloween costume search is put off 'til next week, but I still needed new headphones (as you may remember) so I went to the mall solo tonight.  Insert Forever Alone face here.

Overall I'm relatively pleased with my purchases! I got the new Harvest Moon game -- well, relatively new, it came out last year -- and two pairs of headphones instead of just one, because I lack willpower.  Nail polish for the same reason.  But both the headphones and polishes are really cute so it's okay.

I haven't tried the earbuds yet.  I'm expecting them to be pretty mediocre-to-terrible, since they were only six bucks.  I'm sure they will crap out in a month or two and I'll have to buy another, better pair.  I did try the big over-the-ear headphones on the way home, and I think they were kind of shitty?  I can't really tell.  I mean, they don't sound as good as my old earbuds used to, but that might just be because my earbuds were noise-cancelling and these aren't, so I'm expecting them to be louder than I have a right to expect them to be, uh, loud.  Still, that's what I get for buying the cheapest pairs in the store.  I should have gone for the Skull Candy ones, like TK recommended when I called him for an opinion.

I might end up buying a better pair next paycheck and just keeping these as backup.  They are really cute, and they did a good job of keeping my ears warm.  Plus they fold together to be small enough to be (kinda) portable in my purse, and they have that nifty curled telephone-wire on them which just looks neat.  And they were cheap.  So overall, I'm happy with them.

Trust me, they're adorable.

I haven't played the Harvest Moon game yet.  I'm gonna start it tonight, and I will probably be completely sucked into it and disappear from the world for a week or two once I do.  I will have to do my best not to become completely obsessed.

No promises.

The nail polishes are omfg crazy cute.  I tried the pink and green colours on my left and right hands, respectively.  The pink went on frickin' neon!  I thought it would take a couple coats, but nope.  Straight out of the bottle, blinding pink.  Also it dried into sort of a matte finish, rather than a gloss.  I've never had polish that dries like that before!  I like it.  I always did prefer the feel of a matte finish to a smooth gloss finish.

For the record, my camera does not do justice to the crazy-bright colours of these polishes.  Or to my bright pink headphones, since we're on the subject.  All these colours are like ten times more intense than they look.

So that's what I got at the mall tonight.  It was an arduous journey, but the loot was worth it.  Now excuse me while I go play Harvest Moon for the next eight hours.

George Street Fest

Alternate title to this post, WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO LET'S HAVE A DANCE PARTY!!!!!!!

But yeah, the concert was rad.  Beauwater in particular was friggin' sweet!  I had so much fun I kind of don't know where to start.  I guess being in chronological order then get distracted later in the post and have everything be a muddle?  That sounds good lets do that.

Went down with Ash of hell on heels, and since both of us had wisely decided to eat absolutely nothing of substance before going down to George Street, as soon as we got onto the street we had to find somewhere to grab a bite.  So we get some club sandwiches at O'Reilly's pub and basically chilled there for a while, people-watching.  We saw Fat Fabio, this chunky guy in a tee shirt walking down the street with a big grin on his face, long luxurious blond hair blowing in the wind.  Actually I should save the people-watching till the end of the post, or else I'll just get sidetracked.

So anyway, me and Ash are just sitting around in the pub half-listening to the pretty awesome music from the opening band, and when we're done eating we go out to check them out.  I wish we'd eaten faster, because as it turns out these guys were freaking AWESOME.  I only caught the last part of their set, unfortunately, but they ended with a really great cover of Hey Jude, which my camera mostly mutilated with the audio but hey, at least I got it.  It sounds kind of crappy in the video, but that's none of it the band.  Band rocked this song.

Anyway, Ash and I were totally blown away by these guys.  They were crazy good!  We were so impressed by them that we had to go up after they had finished their set and ask what the name of the band was -- we'd missed it, since we only got in at the end.  And the singer was like "Beauwater -- here!" and gave me an album.  I know!!  It's awesome!!  I'm listening to it right now, it's fun stuff.  

The next band was pretty good too.  Not as good as Beauwater, but still fun.  The guy on keyboards was awesome.  We actually met him like hours later, as Ash and I were walking down the street looking for a not-completely-blocked bar (and ended up in Scanlan's, in case you were curious).  Turns out the lead singer is his dad.  We never would have guessed!  He seemed pretty young on stage.  The singer.  Keyboard guy was I guess a teenager?  I'm terrible at guessing ages. I'm gonna say "somewhere between ten and thirty."

Third Eye Blind was pretty cool too.  Honestly, the first time I'd ever heard of them was like last week when Ash said "Robin, you're coming to see these guys with me on Thursday."  So I was like "Okay," and downloaded a best-of cd to figure out who the heck they were.  I listened to them for a while and was like, Oh!  These guys! These are the guys that did that one song.  Or part of it, at least."

The two and a half minute part, specifically.

But the...band?  Is it a full band or is it like just the one dude, like Owl City or City and Colour?  Because only the one guy was doing the talking.  Whatever, I'll look it up later.  What was I going to say?  Oh right, I was gonna say something about how it's always cool when the band/dude is so pumped and energetic and totally into it that he gets everybody in the audience pumped too, whether or not they started out as pumped-up fans.  Like I started the evening going "Well, it'll be pretty cool, I guess.  Beauwater was rad, so hopefully Third Eye Blind will match up to them!"  And they totally did.  Guy had glow sticks, hucking them into the crowd.  He managed to toss a few up to the people hanging out the second-story windows above the road, that's a pretty good arm!  If only the beer girls earlier could throw like that.  But they only tossed t-shirts to the people jammed up in front.  Which on the one hand, they waited around and jostled to get in front so I guess they deserve a bonus for being good fans?  Or something?  But on the other hand, did they really have to give all the shirts to the front-row people?  Get the beefy guy to toss a few to the farther-back people.  Not at me, because I really don't need a beer-shirt in the face.  But Fantits next to me was fair shrieking for one.  I'm getting off-topic, I'm saving the people-watching for last.  I'm still talking about the band, aren't I?  I think I am.  Band was cool.  I like glow sticks.  Singer dude was good at making me really excited to see him, even though I honestly didn't really know who he was.  I would post the videos I took of Third Eye Blind, but it took an hour and a half to upload the Beauwater video so I'm not gonna do that.  At least not today.  Maybe tomorrow or next week when I've forgotten how annoying that was.

Anyway, the people-watching.  It's the most fun you can ever have on George Street.*  I think I mentioned Fat Fabio earlier, didn't I?  We saw Skinny Fabio afterwards, too.  If only they could have met.  And hipster chicks in weird outfits.  There were two of them, with like...I think it was floral bras/tank tops or something, and supertight short-shorts that go way up over their belly buttons.  It didn't really look bad, just kind of....weird.  It would fit right in on some haute-couture fashion show, but I've never seen real people try to wear the clothes that models wear on a runway.  Mostly because those outfits are weird.  And then there was Fantits.  She was standing next to me for most of the night, and she was hilarious.  She was obviously a huge fan of Third Eye Blind, and kind of a bigger girl.  She was cute, though.  Anyway, she was very loud in her appreciation of the band, and as soon as they showed up she started bouncing.  But not up and down kind of bouncing, she jumped really weird. She went sort of rocking forward and back as well as up and down, so it was like she was boob-tackling the girl in front of her.  Seriously, I was almost worried that she'd get a concussion or something.  Especially odd, she was very concerned with not getting in peoples way and constantly apologized to the people around her for being in their way or blocking their view.  But she never seems to notice the girl she is boob-assaulting.  Or head-assaulting?  Since it's her head getting assaulted, and the breasts are the assault-weapon.  Maybe headboob-assaulting.  I'm getting distracted again.  She was obviously a huge fan, from the superexcited bouncing that started as soon as the band came on and didn't stop for the entire show, and also she knew literally all the words for all the songs.  It was kind of impressive.  

*Citation needed.

I wish I'd had my iPod on me at the concert.  Not to listen to music, but so I could take notes haha.  I just know there are a million things I'm forgetting that I wanted to talk about later, but fuck if I can remember them now.  I suppose if I remember it I'll write another post.  In the meantime, have another Beauwater video!  Not one I took, of course, but there are a few up on Youtube.  Dang, I like these guys!  I should go to another show of theirs one of these days.