I was all irritated this weekend to discover that after two years of basement living, a rat had finally gotten inside. After finding some food strewn around the kitchen, Ralph and I noticed a large, cartoonish semicircle of a hole in the wall down by the baseboard. The evidence was clear — some huge hunk of vermin had violated the Rumpus Room, and needed to be destroyed immediately. I felt worse for Ralph, whose bed isn’t three feet off the floor like mine, and who was a lot more likely than me to hear any scratching around during the night. I plugged the hole up with steel wool until I could get to the hardware store (if they try to eat through it, it chops up their innards and kills them) and tried to think about the things I still liked about my living conditions. The next morning, I filled the hole with poison (mmmm, tastes like peanut butter, apparently) and steel wool, slapped some sheetrock tape over it all, and sealed the whole mess up with some spackle, hopefully trapping the dirty beast in a deadly prison. Do not fuck with a fairy who knows his way around home repair!