R.O.U.S., or I really should have told this story sooner

A few months ago I was awoken by David abruptly bolting out of bed. For the next few minutes, all I heard was the sound of the toilet flushing, repeatedly.

My first thought was that David was sick, but this was unlikely. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in the twenty years that I have known him, he has vomited on exactly one occasion, and that was after having a bad reaction to a raw milk blue goat cheese he sampled at Fairway. (He really liked it at the time!) There have been times when our family has been felled by a stomach virus, and everyone is puking with abandon, and while David is as sick as the rest of us, he can somehow manage to hold onto his lunch. I didn't think it was food poisoning because that night, to celebrate my birthday, we'd been to dinner at Prune, where we ate exactly the same meal (unimaginative, but delicious), and did not drink to excess.

After a few minutes of listening to the symphony of flushing, I called out to see if he was alright. "Yes, I'll be right back..."

When he finally came back to bed, he told me he had woken up when he heard splashing in our bathroom. So he went to check it out, and saw A RAT TRYING TO CRAWL OUT OF OUR TOILET.

Wow.

"What did you do?" I asked.

"I flushed the toilet. A lot. Then I went to the second floor, and flushed the toilet, repeatedly. And then to the first floor, and flushed that one a lot as well. And let's keep the lids down from now on?"

I nodded in approval; it seemed like as good a strategy as any.

The following week, I called our plumber. David mentioned it to a very, very handy friend, as well as the proprietors of a local plumbing supply shop. All had more or less the same reaction: "Wow; I've never heard of that before."

Its not comforting when you stump the home repair experts in their area of expertise. David still can't sleep at night unless the toilet lid is down.