Rats, smoke alarms, and chocolate in carpet

Dear ladies--
Just had an incident this morning and sounds like some of you have had some recent incidents as well....the rats are moving into the homes. If you have seen some signs of rat droppings or heard them scurrying around in the attic then take care of them now. This morning we had a small fire in our attic...I could definately smell smoke and two of our alarms upstairs went off (the other one was out of battery power...I'm ashamed to mention that). There was no explaination for it. The only thing that makes sense is that a rat must have eaten through a wire. We'll investigate to find out for sure tonight, but just be careful. So...watch out for those hungry rats and get them out and away quick!

One more exciting thing I learned this week....I heard you can put salt water on stains in your carpet, let it dry and then vacuum it up. Well, we had a whole glass of hot chocolate spill on our lovely typical white carpet. I was devestated, but chose to put the salt water to the test. I put in 3 teaspoons of salt to 1 cup of water, mixed it up good, then dabbed the spot on the carpet with the wet rag. I even rubbed it in deep and kind of on top. Well, later that day before it dried all the way (I probably should have waited to save our vacuum from now having to give it a thourough cleaning)...I vacuumed it up and voila! The huge chocolate spill was gone! Salt water...who knew!