Sun., Feb. 21

Something woke me up about 4 AM. It was a staccato tapping sound that had a somewhat sharp edge to it. It sounded like it was coming from the skylight area above the futon that I sleep on. The skylight is about 5’ square with a lamp/fan in the middle of it. The skylight actually extends over the opening in the ceiling so there is a flat area on the underside of the opening. The tapping sounds would start again and then stop again, like something running, sniffing, stopping, and sniffing again. Great, I thought, a mouse, or worse yet, a vagrant rat doing laps over my head in the skylight! Just what I need gnawing on my bananas on the counter, or worse yet eating some of my energy bars! This means WAR! Already in a half-waked state I was thinking of calling the landlord and seeing if they had any rat or mouse poison. Looking up in the darkness I thought I saw a dark shape running on the edge of the opening framed by an even larger shape. I didn’t even want to know how it may have got up there.

Finally I just rolled over and tried to go back to sleep as it now sounded like the noise level had increased. As if it had invited its friends over, and they were all doing laps racing around the flat area up there. As it got louder and louder I could just imagine that the fastest runners of the rat world were up there just a few feet over my head taking part in some type of Olympic Rat Running Trials or something. Oh well, since I hadn’t seen any signs of any rodent turds on the floor I thought they must know what they’re doing and hadn’t fallen into the human living space yet.

When I got up a couple of hours later I discovered that it was simply the rain hitting the skylight and not a stray varmit as I’d thought.

I was able to go to the gym finally and work out. The good news is that they have a really nice health facility. The bad news is that I still looked like Pee Wee Herman when I walked out. At the end of my workout I got into the outdoor hot tub with a couple of the post 50 crowd. I didn’t stay very long as all they were talking about was how Wal-Mart vitamins compare with Rite-Aid vitamins. The final straw was when they got into their lumbago issues. I was ‘outta’ there.