The Squirrel: Redux

I left you, dear readers, with me locked in the computer room, the squirrel rampaging through the house, and Hubby on the way home.

When H got home, he decided to go through the house room by room, clearing each room and closing the door. Sounded good. Picture H with a metal bar, a flashlight, and a pellet gun. I'm behind him with a big net on a pole - the kind you scoop big bass out of the water with. We go thru each room, looking under beds, opening every cupboard, closet, and drawer in the house. Poking with the metal bar, top to bottom, end to end, we covered every square inch of that house. No Squirrel.

While we were at it, we started remembering incidents in the last week or so, ones so trivial that we didn't even comment on them: I came home to find H's torchiere lamp on the floor - I righted it and just kept going. H came home one day to find a whole bunch of his papers on the floor, and thought the wind knocked them off. The clincher was on Friday: When I got home, H asked me about my day: did I have a good morning? Did I trip on the wire in my bedroom? yes and no.

Now, my speaker wire, which had been stretched across the doorway and was fine in the crack between the two carpets, had to be taped down when we removed the rugs. When H came home Friday night, the wire was in pieces, and some cards were knocked off the shelf. Since I'm notoriously cranky in the morning, H thought I had had a hissy fit before I went to work! LOL, I'm sure I've given him cause to think that.

We started to notice little signs of a small animal intruder all over in odd places. We found that my door was chewed, and there was a hole up into the door on the bottom, big enough for a mouse to go up in, so H took the door off the hinges and threw it out into the snow.

Saturday found us vacuming and cleaning the place from top to bottom, and searching for a way that the rodent could have entered. Nothing. Exhausting day. We decided to keep all the doors in the house closed at all times, to limit the little rat with a tail to one room, wherever that was.

Open door, close door. rinse repeat.

What a pain, but it worked! The lil bugger was in the basement, and had climbed down the chimney and pried open the damper to the furnace. He was living in the space inside the chimney under the furnace flue, and there was no way to get to him. So, we set the havahart trap, and shut the door to the basement.

Monday he ran all around, and knocked stuff over, but finally on Tuesday he tripped the trap, and he's history!

Thank goodness. Whew.