?=0?

We recently had an uninvited visitor in our house. We never saw him, but he left us a present in one of our cooking pots. It was the size of an olive pit. We didn't know what to do and decided to hope that it had just been our imagination. Then the next day he left us two presents in the same place. We called our landlady, and she immediately sent over her maintenance guy, Bernie, who put steel wool in all the holes between the basement and the main floor and set a bunch of traps in the basement, loaded with peanut butter.

I guess our guest liked peanut butter, because two days later we found another present in our kitchen — this time from Bernie. It was a message written on the back of his business card: "1 down ? to go." He came back to check the traps another two days later and no more had been set off. A third two days' wait brought the same happy story. We hope that's the end of the episode. Pretty easy to deal with, I must say. There are perks to renting.

- Andrew