Woe is me

There is a rodent in my garage and I am freaking the hell out. Yesterday I decided to have the boy mow the backyard while I make my list of goodwill and trash items for the city to pick up, because I do not believe in storing stuff that never sees the light of day. Holiday stuff, fine. But a bunch of bullshit that I don't even know I have until I venture into the garage, and that I never use? Not fine. It's being trashed and I'm organizing that garage and making it useful. So I go in with my notepad and pen and I notice that Seth's bag of walnut shells (we have a leopard gecko named Seth and his tank is lined with crushed walnut shells) is torn open in two, maybe three places. It's sitting on the extra stove that I have that I never got around to selling on craigslist. Well, there are little walnut pieces all over the stove...and little brown poops intermingled :(. I backed out of the garage, closed the door and went inside the house to hug my knees and call my ex, who is being rather nice to me lately for some reason unbeknownst to moi. Anyway, he told me to get rid of the food source (walnut shells) right away, put down some poison and wait for the critter to come out thirsty. If he finds water his insides will explode and he'll die somewhere. 0_0. The hell??? That wasn't the comforting talk I was expecting, lol. If I come home and find a dead rat on my lawn I am liable to have a heart attack. He said he'd come pick it up for me but that is not setting my mind at ease all that much. I'm hoping my son finds it when he comes home from school one day and calls to warn me. So, I didn't get much sleep last night worrying about this rodent (my ex thinks it's a rat but I think he just likes to scare me) getting curious and trying to find some way into my house. The anxiety is bound to kill me. So this weekend I'm having my step pops and my ex come through to go through the garage and get rid of damn near everything in there. I guess I'll lay some poison down today and go inside the house and wait...and panic every time I hear any little noise. I thought about getting a cat but I'm afraid it'll try to eat Seth. I shoulda fed my neighbors cats all those times they stopped by my porch. Dammit! I cannot deal with even the idea of rodents. I feel like bombing the whole garage to smithereens, lol.