flonnebonne | Happy New Year!

It's the year of the rat (year of the mouse in Japan), so I'm going to tell you a story about the little buggers.

When I went back to Canada for Christmas, my parents' garage was crawling with rats. They even got into our car engine and BROKE OUR CAR, which we found out just as we were leaving for Seattle. Good timing. A while before that my dad had cleaned out all the food in the garage in hopes of driving them away, but he forgot to get rid of a bag of bird seed inside a Rubbermaid (TM) container. So of course the rats chewed through the damn Rubbermaid (TM) and continued to live in the garage. Well, when my dad found out he had a big fit and put poison in the birdseed. A few days later we saw a dying rat stumbling through the backyard...where my dog was! The rat, despite being half-dead, leaped at my dog, who, in response, valiantly ran away. Well, I'm not exactly sure if he "valiantly" ran away because I didn't see it, I was only told about it by the rest of my family. Anyway, the moral of this story is that rats are strong and scary and they leave a lot of poo all over the place, so don't put up with them or else they multiply by like a zillion.

(Mice are cute though. We saw one dying in our alleyway and felt emo for it.)

Also, here's a wonderful excerpt from a comic called American Born Chinese. I remember the days when being Chinese was kind of novel. And when Transformers cartoons were my life.