Exterminate, Exterminate

It's not all cross-stitch and homemade bread rolls for the country wife, you know. No sirreee; in fact, sometimes things get really glamorous, and today was no exception. Oh, if only I'd painted my nails to match the box. Red would have been good, don't you think?

Yes, that's right, today the ever-glam country wife turned rodent killer. Well, I didn't actually kill anything today, but I've set the wheels in motion and I soon hope to be enjoying a spot of taxidermy. Joke.

A couple of weeks ago we spotted a huge mound of earth inside the chicken's run; at first we thought the chooks had been making themselves an enormous dust bath and had flicked up all the dirt; it wasn't till we looked around the back of the hen house and saw this, that we realised what was going on. Sorry, the photo isn't very clear, but it's basically the entrance to a rat's nest (is nest the correct word? makes it sound all cosy.) The other entrance/exit is right inside the chickens run.

Neither hubby nor I have any desire to move the chicken house/run and confront the rat, so we've taken the coward's way out and gone for poison. Fear not, the chooks can't actually get hold of the poison themselves so they are (fingers crossed...) quite safe. Hopefully Ratty is less so. Apparently it can take one-two weeks before the rat will even eat the poison as they are very distrusting of new things, but once s/he is used to seeing the poison in the run for a while s/he will hopefully enjoy a feast and then expire. Hopefully the expiring will be done somewhere in the fields beyond our house.

It's clearly the time of year for rats to be making their presence known because at the other end of the garden yet another of the blighters has been enjoying time on the patio. Bold as brass.

After following this one's tracks in the snow over the last couple of days, I worked out that it was coming under the fence from our neighbour's garden and having a little run around on our patio. So this morning I blocked the hole that it's been using (with a highly technical device, known as the [very heave metal] base for the parasol - which clearly we're not going to be needing for the foreseeable future.) Hopefully that will do the trick. If not, I shall reach for my trusty poison once more. Just call me Cruella.
Oh, and while we're on the subject of glamour, yesterday I had a bit of a tidy up in the fridge - flicked a wet cloth at the shelves and rearranged some sticky old jars. I even rummaged around in one of the salad drawers for good measure, and that was where I found this:

I think it might have been a carrot. Now it is an unrecognisable piece of mummified vegetation. Damien Hurst would be proud - and I did this all withough the aid of formaldehyde. Perhaps I shall frame it alongside the (soon-to-be) dead rat as part of a little tableau. I think it will look quite the part, don't you?

And, on an entirely different note, thank you for the comments left on my last post about DC's shyness; it's nice to know he's not the only one! Nursery are still unsure how to handle it; we're happy to ignore it and let him just get on as he is (for the time being at least.)