I am going to try the making a long story short here to get to the point behind the pictures I have:

About three weeks ago I heard some noises in my kitchen. I thought nothing of it, I live in a pretty bustling part of town and my kitchen window leads out to a main street. I figured the noise came from there. A week later I heard the same noise and it didn’t stop. It happened while I was talking on the phone to a friend and I was ignoring the friend because what I heard was something making supper out of my cupboard walls. Then, naturally, I had a cow.
The friend drove over to my house and was brave enough to open the silver wear drawer that was making beautiful music with the vermin clinking his way around the spoons and such. So, we found it, and the friend realized I was not imagining noises.
He (not I, I was fifteen feet back standing on a rubbermaid tub) went in with a skillet ready to smack it dead when we realized the rat had moved out of the silver wear drawer and back into the cupboard below. Ugh. So, after a trip to the store he set traps. Then we sat, and waited to hear a snap. And we did, not much later. The rat had gotten a good beating with not one but three traps. It still was not caught. Then it slithered it’s nasty little self into the wall. We then realized how easy it had been for the thing to enter in the first place. In between the last tenant and I there was some plumbing work done and they never sealed up the wall. There was basically a wall missing from under the sink that led right down to the street where there are several restaurants, dumpsters, etc.
With some quick thinking we nailed a board to the wall, shoved steel wool into every crevas and applied a ridiculously thick coat of Good Stuff, the expanding foam whatnot. As a precaution, I bleached pretty much everything in my house and emptied out the lower cupboards and set four more traps. Big ones, rat traps. Sure enough, a couple days later I heard that nasty little animal with the most revolting tail I have ever seen gnawing on the wall. I called my landlord and told him I wanted to see the Orkin Man and NOW. Then again I heard a loud bang. All noises stopped under the sink and I propped heavy things up against my cupboard doors and left it alone.
This is getting really long, so I will sum things up. I caught him for good. He is deceased. Not sure if it was the trap or the consumed steel wool that did him in, but he’s not with us any longer. But his paw is still attached to the trap and his body is down a hole. I wish I could explain exactly how pitiful this looks and I cannot. It was like he was reaching for freedom (and peanut butter) and was killed in his quest for satisfaction. Here’s an actual picture of him and one that I tried to do MS paint. You cannot see the paw well enough in the actually photo and that’s really the whole point of this nonsense.

Luckily, I got the whole fiasco on video, so when I graduate to learning how to transfer VHS to digital I can share that too. If I have to see a rat, so do you. And if I have to see one ever again, I am moving.

And in closing, I have a really good friend.