Crafty rodent?

One of the benefits that came with changing my living quarters (other than living in a precious home with an even more precious girl) was the accompanying house just for our cars to live in. Of course, we don't store our cars in there. We keep stuff in there. Garages are not for cars. It is a nifty storage closet that we have right out our back door.

This is a helpful because going from a one bedroom apartment that I had completely and fully nested in to one bedroom is a somewhat complicated matter. As in, the total mass and matter of my stuff was in no way going to fit in my new space.

Thankfully, landlord/roomie was generous in letting me set up my massive metal shelf unit and stack all of my necessary items on it. The fact that half of it is taken up with scrapbooking supplies is something I refuse to discuss, let alone really acknowledge publicly. I may or may not be a few years behind.

Well, I went out there yesterday to put away a few items, and generally straighten up. I wonder sometimes if organizing actually relaxes me more than a glass of wine. I digress.

When I moved to grab a shopping bag (yes, I do save and reuse my sturdy shopping bags for all sort of sundry reasons) my fingers slipped through what should have been the handle. Funny, there should have been traction there. Then I look down and realize that the handles are now just stubs with the top having been removed. What the??

I look around, there are several bags that make up my complex organizational system. That includes one bag just to hold all the other bags I'm saving. Each bag is either missing one or both of their handles. They appear to be neatly snipped off. The stubs of phantom handles are all that remains. Again, what the??

Is there a shortage of handle materials in the world that someone has come in and made off with mine? Did the person doing the snipping think that since there were objects in those bags, that I might just want to be able to grab them by their oh-so-convenient handles at some point? What can one do with a re-purposed bag handle? Arts and crafts? Glue them all together to make one enormous big handle that you eventually enter into the Guinness Book of World Records? Or, is this the work of some well-incisored rat? I wouldn't think it makes the best nest-liner, but who am I to judge? Since the one living above the garage is a elementary school teacher, it stands to reason that she needed them for some random project her little kiddos were doing.

I would rather go with that theory, as unprobable as it is, rather than the kind of rat that would bypass the obvious materials of coats, paper towels, and wood chips for some nouveau use of bag handles in his art-deco home in the wall. And yes, all of those things are stored out there, along with enough paper plates for a year, a kitty litter box, a fridge, pieces of furniture and peanut oil. Just in case you have the random urge to fry a turkey.

Oh, and now a random collection of handle-free shopping bags. Perfect solution for those that have a rare aversion to handles, or just find them generally unnecessary.