Thursday, October 19, 2006

Rocky 2


ETA: DS did get a pic of the squirrel when he made his second appearance. He left it in the camera as a surprise for me to find. Like I need any more squirrel surprises!

No, not *that* Rocky. Rocky, as in Bullwinkle. Yep, another squirrel. And it scared the BEGEEZUS outta me. Just how do they know when I'm home alone??

Yesterday afternoon and DH had just called to tell me they were in the car and on their way from airport. I fiddled around a bit in the kitchen and then went into the family room to turn on the TV and veg with Rachel Ray for 20 minutes or so until they came home. As I started to walk over to my chair of choice and grab the remote, something jumped up (besides me) and went scrambling. And it kept scrambling, all over the tops of my wall unit pieces. Yikes. I nearly peed my pants passed out. Then it started making cute little squirrel noises and I relaxed a bit. Just a bit, because, well, I still had a squirrel in the house.

I opened the door to outside and waited. It kept making its little noises, almost like it was scolding me for being in the room. I took the hint. I ran upstairs to get the camera. As you can tell by the absence of a photo here, I never got a pic. When I got back to the family room (after being gone 15 seconds, tops) everything was very quiet and I never heard the noises again.

DH gets home, I tell him I think the squirrel is still there but I haven't seen or heard anything in the last 30 minutes or so and I'm wondering if maybe he did escape out the door after all. DH does some furniture moving and looks behind the wall units as best as he can. Nothing. We all agree that the squirrel is gone. We close the doors, go on our merry way, eat dinner and I go upstairs.

Later, when I come down again, DH tells me that the squirrel never left and that they'd managed to chase it outside through those doors ... where it promptly ran right into the pool and started to dog (squirrel?) paddle like no one's business. DH rescued it with the pool pole/net and it's now free to come into the house yet again. I know, it's probably not the same squirrel, but still.

Yes, DH needs to cover that chimney. But our huge ladder doesn't reach all the way to the top of the chimney and I'm not willing to risk DH's life just to have the chimney covered. I supposed we'll need to rent an even bigger ladder for an hour or so. Yeah, like that's at the top of the list.

6 comments:

  1. Eeeek! More adventures with wild life! Scenes of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation are running through my mind. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Gee, squirrels, owls, what next!? I think you need a cat.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I can really relate to your story. In Australia we don't have squirrels, we have possums. They are similar in that they are small furry animals who've adapted to urban areas and occaisionally invade houses and cause havoc. Possum pee is particularly noxious. We have one (or maybe a family) who have made a nest in a pot plant on our 1st floor balcony. We haven't had the heart to evict it (them) but I live in dread that we'll accidently leave the door open and the possum will come in, or probably worse, the 2 cats will get out and start a fight. No telling which animal would survive!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Aside from birds and squirrels, you also need to consider a chimney cap, a good one, not those little circular things for another very good reason, rain. With no cap, every time it rains, water gets in your chimmney and eventually erodes the morter, leaving holes. When we purchased our 1974 home, we had a chimney sweep clean the chimney. He found holes in the morter and patched them. The former owners had one of those circular shaped things, which lets in water also. We had a new handsome cap made. It covers the entire chimney out to the edge of the brick. I think it cost only $600, far less than replacing the entire chimney.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Our tri-color sheltie chased and momentarily "caught" a squirrel yesterday in our front yard. Duncan says "let me at 'em".

    ReplyDelete
  6. I have to send this to my daughter. We have a special fondness for squirrels at our house (at 14 her beloved "Squirrel" still holds his place of honor in her bedroom). I certainly wouldn't be tickled to have a live squirrel in my house though... mostly because I have a border collie that would tear the house down to get at it!

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for each and every comment. I appreciate them all, but I have to be honest and let you know that I'm usually bad about answering questions. I hope you understand that there just isn't enough time in the day to do everything I want to do.

To help keep spam comments under control, any comments to blog posts that are more than 30 days old are moderated and will not show up immediately.