Scene: Saturday morning. My basement. Recently refinished with new flooring, and remodeled bathroom.

Players: Myself, and my friend who’s been helping me for the past few weeks with said bathroom.

He hasn’t been over since the floors were finished and I’ve painted the bathroom. Today we are just wrapping things up – putting the toilet back and installing the sink and vanity. Needless to say, I’m SO EXCITED to show him how good it looks.

Me: OMG! Doesn’t it look awesome! Now, come look at the bathroom. It looks so good, doesn’t it?!

Him: Uh…is that supposed to be there? (maybe not what he said because OMG I can’t remember specifics at this point)

Me: What?

He points to the floor behind me, underneath the laundry sink.

I look down, and see this:

A FUCKING RAT.

IN MY BASEMENT.

RIGHT NEXT TO ME.

Okay, I don’t care that it’s dead WHATHEMUTHEREFFINGHELL is a RAT DOING IN MY HOUSE?! !?

At this point, I’m like, hyperventilating, jumping all over the place and trying to form complete sentences but HOW CAN I WITH A RAT RIGHT THERE. My friend is just laughing and also being slightly grossed out and simply cracking up because I was all “Look at my beautiful basement!” totally oblivious to the dead animal with a 12 inch tail inches from my feet.

Once I gained enough composure to start breathing, I thought long and hard about how we could have gotten an animal THAT SIZE in our house, and how I didn’t notice. Then I remembered the gaping hole in the floor where the toilet usually sits. We had stuffed paper towels in it 3 weeks before so the sewer fumes wouldn’t stink the house up. I looked in the bathroom – paper towel is no longer in the hole. This thing swam through the sewer (vomitvomitbarfGROSS) and somehow ended up in my basement.

Wait. I should pause this story to add the following sad sidenote: We had to put our cat Boo-boo down on Friday. He had come down with the same disease that was our cat Miles’ ultimate demise. He was getting really sick and we just needed to take care of it before it got out of hand. It was super sad, and we were lucky enough that the sister-in-law was able to be with him when he was put down. (I was at work, and the hubs couldn’t bear to do it – he did it with Miles and couldn’t do it again.) We’ll miss you Bubs.

It dawned on the hubs and I that more than likely, before Boo went to the scratching post in the sky, that he must have killed this rat. I shit you not when I say this rat was half the size of Boo. Like, no effing joke. And Boo killed it. Even as sick as he was, he was still defending his territory.

I told my dad about what happened. His response? Good luck getting your mother over to your house again.