The Thief and the Rat

Day #7

The other night Monte got an email letting us know that our credit card number had been stolen, our credit cards had been cancelled and new ones would be mailed to us in a few days.

The next day Monte got more details from the bank.

Apparently, someone in Kentucky made a credit card with our number on it and tried to charge $246 at a Dollar General.

$246.

How many carts would $246 

fill at a Dollar General?!

3?
42?

Luckily, the bank denied the charge so someone at Dollar General had a lot of merchandise to reshelve on their shift.

I was mentioning this to my friend Beth and she said something similar happened to her except her thief used her credit card number at a Talbot’s.

Is it weird that I was a bit jealous 
of her "classy" Talbot’s credit card thief?

I’m not condoning robbery, but I could almost get behind 

someone’s desperate need for a nice pair of slacks 

and a cute sweater set.

I was at Whole Foods the other day when Monte called.

He asked if I’d checked out yet and I had not.

He said he was in the garage when he saw what he thought was a really fat, slow-moving chipmunk.

Except it wasn’t.

It was a RAT!

Complete with long tail.

Monte has never been super solid at animal identification.

Or animal sounds.

IF YOUR LIFE DEPENDED ON IT,
you couldn’t distinguish between his monkey
and his elephant.

You’d be as good as dead.

Back to the rat…

I almost passed out in aisle 4.

Monte was actually still in the garage when he called.

He started giving me the blow by blow of the rat’s whereabouts.

It took off through the yard.

He asked if Whole Foods had any rat poison.

No big surprise, they did not.

Monte said he was leaving to find some.

I pulled in the driveway to find the garage door open.

I texted Monte to get the last known whereabouts of the rat.

He said the bush by the driveway.

The very bush that was a mere 6 inches 

from where I was currently sitting in my car!

I contemplated calling the girls in the house and having them unload the groceries and form a human/rat barrier for me to make a run for the house.

But I just ran.

Monte came back with some sort of poison rat house that lures the rats in but they HOPEFULLY never leave…alive.

It remains empty in the garage.

I make Monte check morning and night.

So 5 days later, the rat is still out there…somewhere.

Last night I asked Monte if he was somehow inadvertently FEEDING the rat instead of poisoning it.

Like, maybe the rat really likes the taste of the poison??

And over time he’s built up a natural immunity to it???

Didn’t they survive the plague?

Monte decided he needed to buy a BB gun.

Oh, Dear merciful Lord.

I envisioned each BB bouncing off the bulging belly of this fat, slow-moving rat while he casually licked the poison cube inside the rat house like a lollipop.

He’d look at Monte and ask,

“Is that all you got?”

And his voice would be a lot like Paul Lynde’s 

from his voice over work as Templeton the rat 

in the animated version of “Charlotte’s Web.”

SOURCE

I imagine if this rat was human he’d be EXACTLY the kind of guy that would make his own credit card with my number on it and attempt to buy $246 worth of merchandise at Dollar General.