Remy?

Mark and I saw the movie Ratatouille about six years ago. As I remember it, a cute little rat from the sewers moves into the kitchen of a famous Parisian restaurant and proceeds to create spectacular dishes with a little help from a human cook. Mark and I both liked the movie, we just had to suspend our disgust of rats running around in a kitchen to enjoy it.

For the last few nights Bette has been waking me up. I hear the jingle of her tags, and when I look down at the foot of the bed I can see her silhouette in the dark. So I quietly get out of bed, and escort her through the kitchen so that she could go out the back door and pee. Why else would she want to get up in the middle of the night? One thing I noticed as I walked through the kitchen with my flashlight, the broom had fallen down and was laying across the floor. I stood the broom back up behind the door where it is kept and didn't think another thing about it. Next night, same thing, broom on the floor as I walked through the kitchen with Bette. It took my finding a gnawed on hot dog bun on the counter for me to figure out why the broom kept falling over. A rat! The rat is obviously climbing up the broom, jumping over onto the counter, and helping itself to my hot dog buns. On it's way back down it knocks the broom over. So it's all out war. I have put out traps and poison. I'm hoping the traps get the damn thing before the poison, because nothing smells worse than a dead rat stuck somewhere in the wall. Unfortunately I do not have an indoor cat anymore. But I do have Bette, though I'm not sure what she can do about a rat other than wake me up so I can listen to it scurry around the kitchen too.