What a weekend!  It started with a fruit rat and ended with a rose on fire!  Luckily for the rat, the two are unrelated.  In retrospect, I may as well have sent the rat an invite and laid out the china.  I was being lazy again, but in my defense, it was heat induced.  July in Florida is like walking over hot coals through a sauna at the bottom of a volcano.  That may seem a bit much, but it was in the nineties and I was about to mow the lawn.  The extra step of gathering a couple measly grapefruit and walking them over to the garbage seemed entirely unnecessary.  Wrong!  The mower blades sliced them open cleaner than a kitchen knife.  Juicy, gaping grapefruit is apparently tempting enough to lure a rat out in daylight making that extra step entirely necessary.On to my next problem…something else gaping in my garden.  Cooper noticed it first; it was a small little dip in the lava rock.  I made John clear out the rocks to see what was underneath – our own garden version of Fear Factor.  Half way down he says, “I’m trying to act cool, but this is really freaking me out!”  No kidding!  That’s why my hand isn’t in the hole!  But someone had to do it; before Fear Factor, we were living in our own version of Caddyshack.  Gopher, mole, whatever it was, it was destructive.  That was about a year ago when we could actually see the tunnels.  They were everywhere – along the house, through the roses, and in the grass.  We would stomp one down to find two more.  We looked into traps.  My aunt told me to put Wrigley’s gum in the ground.  We were up for anything, and then it just went away.  Or so we thought…The frustration from a year ago must have rushed back because John had that hole filled with gasoline in an instant.  I was still yelling (from a safe distance), “What about my roses?”  “They’ll be fine” he said.  Then whoosh!  The fire sprung about 4 ft. out of the ground.  Poor Tropicana - every branch was outlined in flames.  Too bad about the picture, but the fire burst so fast that I jumped, clicked, and ran – probably all at the same time and that’s why it’s so blurry.  Those are Cooper’s skinny legs running by.  John’s out of the frame, but he was backed up against the house with teeny puffs of smoke wafting from his eyelashes – all this from an ex-fire commissioner!  He had this idea a year ago and was vetoed faster than the fire burst.  No wonder he was so stealth grabbing the gas can from the garage.  I stand by my veto.  Let it be known that Lettuce Share does not endorse backyard fire starting!                                                           R.I.P. Tropicana