Zwei arten Raten
Jun. 14th, 2007 10:24 pmMy Wife refers to her brother and his wife as scrabbling rats. Nothing, seemingly, is safe from their depredations during their frequent raids visits. If there is any foodstuff that we wish to keep for more than 12 hours we have to hide it in the recesses of our closet (even keeping it reserved in a snack-bowl on the bookshelf in the bedroom is not sufficient). They are constantly dieting, and making a point of eating half the regular portion at dinner. Never-the-less, within this very hour, the She-rat (as she is known) turned a brick of havarti weighing more than a pound (which we had intended to serve as the center-piece of a lunch and a couple of snacks over the weekend) into a cheese sandwich for a pre-dinner snack. The only safety for a thing like that is the back of the bottom shelf, since they will not condescend to stoop.
Nor do they limit their marauding to food. They live in an apartment building with its own laundry room, but they do their laundry here; occupying our own quite spacious laundry room for two or three days a week. Not even once in many years have they brought a single jug of detergent (they bring prepared food about once a year for dinner). At one time the laundry room was liberally provided with hangers for suspending shirts to dry and the like. Then they vanished, kidnapped away to the rats’ apartment since they refuse to remove their dry clothes from the hangers before putting their clean clothes in the car. Then it was again refreshed with a new supply of hangers, only to have them vanish down the rat-hole again, and a third time, and more. Now there are only the fewest hangers that we must carefully horde and shepherd back and forth for our own needs. The other day the She-rat asked my wife, “Can I borrow some clothes-pins?” She was told plainly, “Well, there used to be many clothespins in here, but since you have taken them all home with you, I now keep only the minimum number that I need for my own use hidden in the closet, and therefore can’t produce anymore now. And I’m not buying any more.” But no clothespins or hangers have lately reappeared (one small bundle of such things might come back once a year).
But, as usual, there was a single egregious event that reached the tipping point of this rather ungracious tirade. My wife’s other brother is diabetic (he has one of the He-Rat’s kidneys in place of his own, so it is not as if generosity is completely unknown to them). So, since they have been playing golf a great deal now (one is an adjunct historian on summer hiatus, the other a recently laid-off banker), the diabetic brother has been carrying a lunch box with him, and keeping in it besides his lunch a snickers against the possibility of a sudden catastrophic drop in blood sugar. This morning as they were preparing to go, the diabetic brother asked the other, “Do you happen to know what happened to my snickers?” The other answered, “Well, yes, you know nothing like that is safe around me,’ openly admitting it.
Scrabbling little rats are so poorly mannered these days.
Nor do they limit their marauding to food. They live in an apartment building with its own laundry room, but they do their laundry here; occupying our own quite spacious laundry room for two or three days a week. Not even once in many years have they brought a single jug of detergent (they bring prepared food about once a year for dinner). At one time the laundry room was liberally provided with hangers for suspending shirts to dry and the like. Then they vanished, kidnapped away to the rats’ apartment since they refuse to remove their dry clothes from the hangers before putting their clean clothes in the car. Then it was again refreshed with a new supply of hangers, only to have them vanish down the rat-hole again, and a third time, and more. Now there are only the fewest hangers that we must carefully horde and shepherd back and forth for our own needs. The other day the She-rat asked my wife, “Can I borrow some clothes-pins?” She was told plainly, “Well, there used to be many clothespins in here, but since you have taken them all home with you, I now keep only the minimum number that I need for my own use hidden in the closet, and therefore can’t produce anymore now. And I’m not buying any more.” But no clothespins or hangers have lately reappeared (one small bundle of such things might come back once a year).
But, as usual, there was a single egregious event that reached the tipping point of this rather ungracious tirade. My wife’s other brother is diabetic (he has one of the He-Rat’s kidneys in place of his own, so it is not as if generosity is completely unknown to them). So, since they have been playing golf a great deal now (one is an adjunct historian on summer hiatus, the other a recently laid-off banker), the diabetic brother has been carrying a lunch box with him, and keeping in it besides his lunch a snickers against the possibility of a sudden catastrophic drop in blood sugar. This morning as they were preparing to go, the diabetic brother asked the other, “Do you happen to know what happened to my snickers?” The other answered, “Well, yes, you know nothing like that is safe around me,’ openly admitting it.
Scrabbling little rats are so poorly mannered these days.