RATS! update

Here's some e-mail excerpts between me and my parents...

So, we have a rat problem.
It went from seeing one for the first time in our apartment the other night to finding droppings (around/in the bed!) to now I can't sleep because I can hear them walking around everywhere! They're chewing through the bags we keep over the stove (I guess they smell like food because the exhaust fan runs through there) and there seem to be mice living under our bed now.
This all seemed to develop in a couple of days! It's insanity.
ANyways, I really can't sleep, the sounds of their movements keep jarring me awake and freaking me out. Thsi could possibly explina why I got sick recently... I thinkand extreme cleaning is in order for tomorrow.

Any advice?

So, all that turned out to be more than a bit paranoid, as you will see in the following...

So, about half an hour after I e-mailed you last night (mom) to tell you about our rat problem, Jessie and I both leapt out of bed. The rat who had been running around under our bed finally jumped for it, which had been our big fear anyways. Not that it was a trained attack rat, but rather that it might get scared and tangled in the covers and bight out of fear...
So we both ran out of the room pretty quick, and the rat (who did not successfully make it onto the bed) ran off away into the corner.
We gathered ourselves, and then I pulled all the bedding off of the bed and we tried to round it up. It was hidden between the head board and the wall, so it would be easy to corral it into the garbage bin... or so we thought.
We wound up chasing it out, and it hit the end of the bin, turned around, and jumped into the frame of the bed. I had a little broom, so I started banging around, and finally it hit and the thing ran out and scaled up the side of our bureau! Then it hid in the bedding up top.
I pulled all three bureaus off the wall so that it would be impossible to hide between/behind them. It just leapt off, probably six and a half or seven feet.
Finally we scared it back between the bed and the wall, so it would be easy to corral again. This time Jessie covered the escape route with a serving platter, and we caught it! But then it jumped out and hid in the bookshelf!
Oh, and this was at about 1:30 in the morning, so our downstairs neighbours probably hate us now.
So there it was, cowering in the bookshelf. You really had to feel sorry for it. It probably had no idea what was going on!
I put down the garbage can in front of the shelves and started poking at it with the reaching broom, and finally it jumped out from the shelves... straight into the garbage can! Seriously, we could not have planned that any better.
Jessie put the serving platter over it, and I held it down while she got her camera! We were going to put it outside and try to get a picture of the mighty beast. It was really trying to get out too, it just kept jumping again and again against the serving platter. Luckily, I was holding it down, although I was nervous because there was a hole about half an inch wide on either side of the platter.
We got it outside (along with our food waste, the bucket for which we had originally tried to use, until we realized that it was really leaky and disgusting) and I took the lid off. It didn't move, I guess it was pretty dazed/scared. Then Jessie tried to take a picture, but her camera was out of batteries. Bad luck.
The thing wouldn't move though. It just sat in the bottom of the bin. Finally I gave it a little kick, and it just leapt out and took refuge in the garbage pile.
It'll probably be happier there anyways.

So, it was quite an exciting night.

Now, since then, we have not seen or heard a single rat. I covered the point of entry (the hose hole in our laundry room drain, which had come undone for some reason) and put steel wool in the gaps. Our follow-up research (hey, yeah, we're nerds) revealed that it was in fact a "house rat", so it must have been pretty confused to find itself in an apartment. Oh yeah, and that rat is the one that transported the plague, so yay!

This morning I thought I heard one, but it turned out to be a trick of early morning deliriun and construction in front of our building.

More rat updates as events warrant.