In case any of you thought I was kidding about that whole living in filth thing, rest assured that I was not. Apparently the vacuum cleaner incident was just the first blow in what promises to be a trifecta of stair-stepping descents into abject squalor.

Last weekend (when it started getting really hot), we were driving to our friends' house and discovered that the air conditioner in our car no longer works. It could have been not working for months for all we knew, so we just kind of sighed and made plans to take it into the car place.

Which mr rampy did this morning, and then I called him at work to see if they knew yet if I could pick it up tonight or not.

"Well," he said. "The bad news is that we have rodents."

At which point I did the most muted, 'I'm at work now and can't let myself express my feelings as freely as I would like at this moment' version of leaping up on my chair and squealing EEEEEEEEEEE, as I could.

Hearing 'we have rodents', you would picture a nest of little mice nestled around the engine block, wouldn't you? A tiny colony of vermin wintering under our hood completely unbeknownst to us. Or, if you were in a particularly macabre mood, as I was, perhaps you would picture them as dead, their charred rodent carcasses blocking some essential coolant tube and causing the air conditioning to malfunction.

But no. All that had happened was that some mouse, rat, feral gerbil, or maybe even a devil squirrel had chewed through some important cable. My suspicion falls on the gang of huge, tail-less rats that haunts our back alley, laughing at the signs the city posts on telephone poles to warn people of their presence.

So it wasn't quite as bad as I had expected, which was a scenario about three steps scarier than that old joke about the mechanic fixing the squeaking noise the lady is hearing in her car by coaxing a mouse family out of her car seats with cheese crackers.

Too bad. For a second I had hopes of becoming twinkies with the new millenium's version of Dr. Dolittle (the millenial twist being that all her animals are vermin of some sort!), only I would be reaching under the hood, rather than into my purse.

Of course, the rats of NIMH could build a supercomplex under my hood, and I would never know. I check the oil so rarely (read: never) I don't even know how to open the hood.

I hope those car peeps take a moment out of fixing the cable to spread some rat poison around and to check the oil.