why rats have bad breath

well hello friends.  happy monday.  how are you?

i hope you had a good weekend.  as i sit here typing this blog post, i can hear the dishwasher draining.  it had become something of a habit over the past several weeks to go a look to see if it is leaking water all over the kitchen floor.

i guess i should back up. 

new year’s eve i was putting together a little cheese and cracker tray for us to enjoy while we watched football and movies.  i hear an unfamiliar trickling sound.  which was the dishwasher drain house spilling out into the kitchen.  so tripp pulled out the dishwasher and sure enough, there was big hole in the drain hose.  so after a mad dash to home depot for a replacement, we {and when i say ‘we’ i mean ‘tripp’} got it fixed and put back together in time to watch a four hour ‘walking dead’ marathon on a&e. 

two days later…same exact thing.

we’ve seen a few mice in the backyard here and there. and occasionally daisy will chase one down into the storm drain out by our garage.  so we figured that was the culprit.  and for a few weeks we haven’t noticed anything.  until last night.  water seeping out from under the dishwasher.  well this time when we pulled it out, the little bastard came running out. and i wasn’t a mouse.  it was a rat.

so. gross.

tripp, once again pulled out the dishwasher and as we expected there wasn’t just a little hole in our drain pipe…the little F***er almost chewed it in half!

and this time when we looked back behind the dishwasher, there was a little pile of dry dog food kibbles.  so apparently our house was the ‘all you can eat’ buffet.

i will just skip over all the cursing and F-bombs that were dropped yesterday afternoon.

well so tripp did a little internet research, because clearly our attempts to keep this SOB out of the house were not working.  and he found two things of interest:

1. an ultrasonic wave thingy that is pet friendly.
2. apparently rats hate the smell of peppermint.

so yesterday afternoon we made a made dash to the hardware store and picked up the ultrasonic wave thingy.  plus a rat bait kit that is safe to keep around pets.  and a trip to whole foods provided us with the 100% oil of peppermint concentrate we were looking for.

sidenote: tripp now knows what a ‘hipster’ looks like.

the internet tip for the peppermint oil suggested saturating cotton balls with the oil and placing them at openings where the rat might be coming in. so we did that. plus i also rubbed the drain hose with it.  plus i also tucked cotton balls back behind the dishwasher.

needless to say my house smells like an altoid factory right now. but so far, we are rat free.

{muah hah hah hah hah}

that’s my evil villain laugh in case you were curious.

anyway, at the end of that ordeal i decided a cocktail was in order.

and that my friends was my day yesterday.  it went exactly as i had planned.

or not.

but all is well that ends well.  and on the bright side… i have the freshest smelling house in the neighborhood.

love, kelly