On Wednesday morning, we came into the kitchen to find an orange slice on the stove and a tomato that seemed to have exploded. This was obviously troubling.
My initial thought was that one of us had sleepwalked, and acted out some rage issue against fruit. I realize this is a strange explanation to reach for first — maybe I’m the culprit! — but it may explain why I’m a screenwriter.
The much more reasonable instinct would be to assume we had some sort of visitor. A mouse, a rat, a squirrel. Or possibly a raccoon — our housesitter had mentioned seeing one over the holiday. We set a peanut butter-baited mousetrap on the counter, and sure enough, at 4:50 a.m. Thursday I heard it snap. There was no critter under the bar, however.
I know through friends that a raccoon has to be handled differently than a mere mouse or rat, so I was determined to figure out which kind of varmint we had. I set my MacBook’s built-in camera to shoot one frame of video per second, and left the lights dimmed in the kitchen. I also re-baited the trap, this time with hummus.
This morning, I came downstairs and saw with disappointment that the trap hadn’t popped. But scrubbing through the video, I got my answer.
Fans of The Nines may recognize the kitchen, and the accuracy of Margaret’s “they live in the palm trees” line.
**UPDATE:** Conventional rat trap worked. It snapped four minutes after leaving the room. Cleanup was bloodless, but still more unsettling than I anticipated. Rat Guy comes Monday to figure out how it got in.
**FURTHER UPDATE:** [Here](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/the-rat-is-dead).