{"id":3023,"date":"2024-12-04T01:57:54","date_gmt":"2024-12-04T01:57:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/?p=3023"},"modified":"2024-12-22T23:23:46","modified_gmt":"2024-12-22T23:23:46","slug":"gotcha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/gotcha\/","title":{"rendered":"Gotcha!!!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">RIP Arnold<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_3025\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-3025\" style=\"width: 290px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-3025\" src=\"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/IMG_4270-scaled-e1733277345724-300x225.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" srcset=\"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/IMG_4270-scaled-e1733277345724-300x225.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/IMG_4270-scaled-e1733277345724-600x450.jpeg 600w, https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/IMG_4270-scaled-e1733277345724-1024x768.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/IMG_4270-scaled-e1733277345724-768x576.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/IMG_4270-scaled-e1733277345724-1536x1152.jpeg 1536w, https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/IMG_4270-scaled-e1733277345724-2048x1536.jpeg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-3025\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Actually, Arnold was a rat &#8211; rats have hairless tails. It was the fact that his was brown not pink that confused me. A noble adversary&#8230;<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/embed.acast.com\/6766f4022dc5d9b993aeca62\/6767751225a0b820a2b38c61\" width=\"100%\" height=\"80px\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It\u2019s over. After two weeks, five mouse traps, one packet of rat poison, ten helpful suggestions and about a quarter of a jar of peanut butter, Arnold is dead.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And I feel awful about it.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As a vegetarian sailing a boat with a Buddhist name, we should have done better. But this is Colombia and, as I mentioned last time, the concept of a humane mousetrap simply does not translate into Latino Spanish.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Consequently, night after night, I would fall asleep listening to him behind the panelling, gnawing \u2013 and rose the next morning to find all the traps licked so clean they might have been through a dishwasher.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Admittedly, Arnold did nearly come to a sticky end (literally) after I took a taxi to HomeCenter \u2013 a superstore the size of one of South America\u2019s smaller countries to buy a pair of sticky traps. The idea behind these is that the mouse puts his foot in the goo and can\u2019t get it out. They hadn\u2019t tried it on Arnold, though. He did put his foot in the goo \u2013 but then dragged the trap all over the fo\u2019c\u2019sle covering everything else in goo, before finally shaking it off in a Sainsbury\u2019s bag-for-life (which now has a much shorter life). Anyway, he bolted.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Next, I mashed up a sort of Rouillard of rat poison and peanut butter, reasoning that he would be so busy licking it off and feeling smug that he would never realise he was eating the condemned mouse\u2019s last meal.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I don\u2019t know how he did it, but the entire dessert disappeared and Arnold did not. I can only think he spat out the blue bits and ate the brown. Anyway, as a savoury, he chewed the top off my clarinet reed. It was a Vandoren and I take it as a personal affront. Arnold was toying with me.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">He made me feel like the put-upon Commandant in The Great Escape when Steve McQueen grins at him on the way to the cooler and says: \u201cYou\u2019ll still be here when I get out?\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It\u2019s my own fault. I underestimated him from the start. Because he joined in Aruba, I presumed he had jumped off one of the enormous cruise ships and would be easy prey. He had probably lived his life on smoked salmon and truffles.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Well, now the gloves were off. For one thing, I was being goaded by Niko Bolas, a regular on the blog who announced he was sending me two electronic devices. I looked them up. They made <em>my <\/em>hair stand on end. Any mouse putting a foot inside would get zapped with the full force of six AA batteries. But the Amazon delivery won\u2019t get here until December 12<sup>th<\/sup>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It was time to man up. I spent a day in the Public Market \u2013 Santa Marta\u2019s version of Camden with stalls selling everything including, tucked away behind the grilled sausages and the pineapples, mouse-sized mousetraps: Maybe Arnold wasn\u2019t ready for the rat-sized one yet (although, the rate he was getting through peanut butter, it wouldn\u2019t be long.).<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I filed down the bars that spring the traps to make the mechanism more sensitive \u2013 a sort of hair-trigger, if you like. Now I felt like Edward Fox in The Day of The Jackal \u2013 a cold, calculating professional.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And, sure enough, on the second morning, there he was, hanging off the side of the navigator\u2019s seat, his neck squished under the big trap\u2019s mega-spring, his naughty little nose in a pool of blood. Of course, he\u2019d polished off the other traps first.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>RIP Arnold It\u2019s over. After two weeks, five mouse traps, one packet of rat poison, ten helpful suggestions and about a quarter of a jar of peanut butter, Arnold is dead. And I feel awful about it. As a vegetarian sailing a boat with a Buddhist name, we should have done better. But this is &#8230; <a title=\"Gotcha!!!\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/gotcha\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Gotcha!!!\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3023"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3071,"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3023\/revisions\/3071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racecoast.net\/omstest\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}