Carpetblogger

Night Slugs

Regular readers know that, over the past four years, members of my household and I have gone to war with various kinds of vermin: Cockroaches in a computer, rats in a washing machine, feral cats attached to a carpetdog's head, and of course, primates.

But lately, I have been struggling with a mysterious force that has challenged me in new and troubling ways. This adversary is particularly vexing because I have never once seen it, only wiped its slime off my shoes and the entry carpet in the mornings.

The Night Slugs.

Our ground floor is more or less below ground, at about street sewer level. This has a lot more cons than pros. The house is poorly ventilated so at best, it smells musty fusty in the guest quarters. At worst, it smells like raw sewage, and not just when it rains. This doesn't deter as many guests as you might expect. We have issued a lot of frequent stayer cards with the caveat "management ignores complaints about the sewage."

Well, there's also the Night Slugs.

They come every night. Evidence of them is abundant -- every morning there are slivery trails of slime along the edge of the walls and cursive loops on the carpet. Now I can keep odd hours --coming home late, leaving for the airport early, arriving home early from the airport. I have never seen a Night Slug.

As a native of the Pacific Northwest, I know from slugs. Banana slugs. The great grey garden slug. The spotted leopard slug. I once saw a banana slug the length of my forearm in front of an outhouse (that outhouse was at Sammamish Bible Camp where I accepted Jesus into my heart in an unrelated incident, not in our backyard, k?). But even in my ancestral home, which far too often sheltered undomesticated animals, slugs were not allowed.

Because slugs were more common in my childhood than dogs and cats and sheep, I learned how to massacre them early -- cups of beer, a squirt of ammonia and best of all, salt. You have not LIVED until you've salted a slug and watched it instantly dehydrate like a living raisin.

I figured Turkish slugs would be no match for a native Slug Master like me. I placed salt all around the baseboards. Imagine my horror when there was no noticeable decrease in slug activity. Apparently Turkish slugs are immune to salt. 

This frightens me. What kind of invisible mutant slug is immune to salt? But you know what? It doesn't frighten me half as much as some of these helpful slug hints that I found while searching for slug pictures. (It says it's a quiz, but they're all true. Proceed with caution. Highlight: Slugs produce mucus so strong that they can hang from it in midair to copulate, which they do, at the ends of stretchy mucus strings more than a foot long.) In fact, that list -- which could only be published in a Seattle paper -- derailed this whole post.

So memo to guests: watch out for copulating slugs when you get up in the middle of the night. Management does not accept complaints about those, either.

Cockroach Mule

This is a complicated story, so pay attention.

Like most electronic equipment in Crapistan, my laptop was mortally wounded by power surges.  It needed a new motherboard. Because of the lack of qualified computer guys and limited supply of motherboards in Kyiv, I took it to the US to get it repaired while I was home.

After a diligent craigslist search, I found a computer guy in DC who could help. Since new motherboards are hard to find and expensive and I didn't want to buy a new laptop, he said he would try to find a used one on EBay. 

He found a laptop identical to mine with a broken monitor. He put my monitor and hard drive in it and shazam! Mostly fixed for $250. He would have charged more, but the power connector still needed to be soldered and he couldn't do that. I told him I would have our office computer guy take care of it in Kyiv. Ukrainians can solder anything.

Now, I work with a crowd of clowns. If they told me the sky was blue, I would look outside to verify. So when they told me Bogdan the computer guy opened my computer to solder the power connection and found a teeming mass of cockroaches living inside, I said, "bring me the can of Raid and their corpses, as well as dated, unphotoshopped evidence."

*not the actual cockroach

This raised some troubling questions. Wouldn't importing a laptop full of cockroaches from America to Ukraine violate of all kinds of agricultural regulations? How much did my colleagues pay Bogdan the computer guy to go along with the ruse, even going so far as running to the online translator to look up the English word for what he saw in my computer? Isn't that completely disgusting?

I think they overplayed their hand. One or two cockroaches, while still disgusting, is more plausible and seems like a reasonable cost of doing business with Craigslist computer guys and EBay.

This story is still developing. While it is not at all clear how many cockroaches I carried back to Ukraine in my EBay laptop or how they got there, everyone does agree it was more than one. If I ever get the promised photos, I'll certainly share them and we can put this matter to rest.

The Producer agreed to buy me a new laptop too. (For other stories about my experiences with vermin, check out Rat Master.)

Passing the Torch

Contorted from eight hours in a Volga and reeking of assfat, I arrived home from my forced march across the regions last night. All I wanted was a little cherry juice spiked with Moscowskaya.

I opened the front door to find a dead rat lying in the hall.

Too some degree, I was relieved. I knew the City Rat Master had been by earlier that day to strategically lay some Rat Smack. A rat carcass was better than dog carcasses.

I was also relieved to see that, while it was a rat of considerable girth, it wasn't as big as I expected.

However, I was deeply disturbed at the prospect at removing it. The Producer acted all brave over the phone, insisting that if I would only stop wailing and wait 15 minutes, he'd be home to deal with it.

Fat chance.

I summoned the courtyard kids and one of the braver ones disposed of it. Thus, I am forced to rescind the title of Rat Master,

Rat Master!

I am the RAT MASTER!

We have had an exciting weekend, full of mystery, revulsion, edification, revelation, misplaced blame and best of all, resolution.

Lately, we have been having a curious amount of trouble with laundry. And, trust me, this is very relevant to my evolution as a certified RAT MASTER.

First of all, we recently discovered that the reason why our clothes never get clean to our satisfaction is because Samaya, our cleaning lady, doesn't actually wash our clothes in the washing machine, preferring, instead, to do them the old-fashioned way -- by hand in the tub. It is not clear how long she's been doing this, but it's probably been a while since the washing machine has been used with regularity.

So, we started doing our own laundry in our machine. This led to all the problems.

The first time I used the washing machine a few weeks ago, the rinsewater drained all over the kitchen floor (the machine is under the kitchen counter, like a dishwasher), resulting in the parquet buckling to such a degree that speedbumps prevent us from walking to the sink without stumbling.

I called the master in to fix the washing machine, I got the typical response: "I don't see any problem with the washing machine. It works fine." So, I ran a load of wash, and, again, water drained all over the floor, causing so much buckling that we can't easily open or close the refrigerator door. This is a major annoyance, but, in truth, not really relevant to the story.

So, being the resourceful homeowner that I am, I assessed the situation and determined that, for whatever reason, the outlet hose from the washing machine wasn't staying in the drain. While it is certainly the case that that the machine hadn't been used in a long time, this had never happened before. I got the duct tape and secured it it until I could retain the services of a more competent master.

Now, in the meantime, The Producer spotted a mouse in the kitchen. This caused some alarm. However, because of our inability to reach consensus about what to do about it, no action was taken.

Today, I opened the cabinet under the sink, which houses the laundry detergent and the drain for the washing machine. I noted a whole bunch of something that looked like pellets of shit.

Now, I grew up in an environment in which I was not unexposed to the output of various rodents, but this had to come from something the size of a rabbit. AND, there was a pile of kibble and small pieces of bread in the corner.

RAT! Not a mouse, a RAT!

I nearly fainted at the prospect.

I had yelled at some dogs Saturday for removing a loaf of bread from the kitchen counter. I slowly realized that it probably wasn't the dogs who ate half a loaf of bread and left it on the floor. I was wracked with guilt!

It was, in all likelihood, the work of the biggest fucking rat in the world. The dogs were probably cowering in the corner, trembling in fear, much like their father was during the mystery-solving phase of this story.

I sprung into action. I looked up the word for rat in the dictionary. I hustled down the street to the Cheap Chinese Plastics store, at which I vaguely recalled seeing anti-rat products. After an elaborate pantomime in which I expressed my shame, horror and disgust at having a rat in my house, and the owner expressed his sympathy and recommendations for the most effective solution to my problem (in the debate over glue versus poison, poison seemed to fit my needs better. I wish I could convey the body language that helped settle this discussion), I ran home with a packet of little purple pellets.

Worried about negative impact of rat poison on my dogs, I thought I'd check with a local. I called my most senior male staffer and asked for his advice.

It turns out, and this is very interesting, that every neighborhood has an epidemiology office that is in charge of investigating rat issues. Upon getting a report, they will come an lay down poison and block the entrance the rat is using to gain access. This is a vestige from the Soviet era. He said we would call this office on Monday and come up with a dog-friendly rat termination strategy.

I found this reassuring, but I am sure it is not as easy or convenient as all that. Paperwork will probably have to be filled out and bribes asked for and denied. This is, after all, Azerbaijan.

I still felt like I needed to take some action on my own.

I studied the undersink area for possible access points. Slowly, I came to an astounding realization:

The reason why the outlet hose wasn't staying in the drain was because it was being chewed through and pushed out! I looked at it again, and despite having just been fixed by a master two days before, it was sticking out of the drain with gnaw marks all over it!

I was stunned! Shocked! A range of emotions convulsed through my body. I felt triumph, like Nancy Drew solving three important household mysteries at once -- the rat, the eaten bread and the washing machine leak. But, at the same time, I realized the rat was coming up the drain from the sewer into my house! More shame and horror.

I rebounded quickly, however. I realized that this vile situation presented an opportunity for me to exact retribution on the rat while at the same time protecting my family, one quarter of which was behaving like a little girl throughout this ordeal.

I could pour the rat pellets down the drain!

With a feeling of power and superiority, I poured half the packet down the drain and put the rest in a little dish in the back of the cabinet. We taped the door shut to prevent accidental canine access.

Now, I am going to sit back and wait for the little purple pellets to work their magic. And, I am going to start doing a lot more laundry, flushing those little bastards back down to the stinking sewers of Baku from whence they came.

I am also considering trading in two dogs and a Producer for some more useful cats.