posted on Jan, 17 2020 @ 09:32 AM
Just what everybody wants to do first thing in the morning before coffee after a family game night of Monopoly that ran really late -- flush a wild
animal out of the house. In our case, a squirrel that got in via the chimney and got through the fireplace doors. Damn thing must have body slammed
the magnetic doors open.
I was rather rudely awoken around 7:30 or 8:00 by the older kid yelling from downstairs, "Who the heck let a squirrel in the house?" To which
my fuzzy, barely awake brain went, "Huh? What is she yelling about down there?" I noticed a lot of thumps and thuds in quick succession, so I figured
maybe I should drag my ass out of the warm, cozy bed and figure out what exactly was going on, because "squirrel" and "in the house" hadn't quite
registered yet. Lack of coffee, ya know?
I stumbled my butt over to the doorway and peeked around the corner of the stairwell into the offensiveness that was the bright morning sun shining
through the front door's floor-to-ceiling side windows. Ugh, too damn early for that assault on the eyes. Then I noticed a small, brown fuzzy thing
barreling up the stairs at me. In my groggy state, best I could do was back up real quick while making some kind of squeak-yelp noise, slam the door
shut just in time to hear the animal slam into it & bounce off, and yell at hubs to "Get the hell up, there's an animal in the house, and it's not one
of ours!"
He groggily stumbles his own hind end out of bed, muttering something under his breath I'm sure wasn't polite, and goes out the door. "Yep, it's a
squirrel. I gotta go to the bathroom first." And so he does, lmfao, leaving the squirrel running around the living room like a chicken with it's head
cut off, and the older kid in the kitchen armed with the broom, lmfao. It actively avoided the kitchen, so she was safe in there.
The older kid did have the good sense to make sure Bert's hutch was latched (he spends the night in it now, on account of peeing on the couch in the
middle of the night) and to shove the cat in the younger kid's bedroom & shut the door. The cat was cowering under the kitchen table like a 4-legged
pansy-ass, so it's not like he was going to help corner it. If our Old Man cat was still around, he'd have caught and eaten the squirrel already by
that point, but this one is far from a hunter.
So at that point, the cat's meowing his ass off in the younger kid's room, the bird's going nuts, Bert's hyperactively running around his hutch like
"Oh boy, oh boy, a new friend? Hi, new friend, hi!" Yeah, good thing he wasn't out roaming around. Oh, and the squirrel's still going bats# crazy
around the living room, there wasn't much left on the mantle or fireplace's flanking bookshelves at that point. It'd pretty much knocked everything
off by then.
Hubs tried to corner and grab it with a blanket, but that didn't work well, squirrel was too wiggly. So we came to the conclusion real quick to just
grit our teeth, fling the front door wide open, brace the screen door open, block off the stairs with one of the bigger pictures off the wall, and
block off the open side of the front hall that goes to the downstairs bedrooms with another big picture off the wall, and hubs would herd the squirrel
in the direction of the door.
It worked. Squirrel took off like greased lightning as soon as it saw the open door to the cold-ass outside world. Squirrel had such velocity going
forth that it skidded and careened into the glass storm door on the screen door, "THOOOOOIIIIINNNNNNGGGGG!" I half-expected a shattered 6 foot pane of
storm glass, but it luckily held up fine.
After that, the pictures were re-hung, and the living room cleaned up. A crystal vase on the bookshelves got knocked over, I'm damn surprised it
didn't break. Bert was so wound up that he was more interested in investigating the spots the squirrel was than eating his breakfast (probably
sniffing the odor trail, must have smelled weird to him) And the bird calmed down to annoyed bitching-chattering (bird owners know the chatter type I
mean) That was well-before his wake-up time, he tends to sleep until around 10am, so he was not happy.
After everything was said & done, and cleaned up, turns out that older kid only woke up because the squirrel was tear-assing through her room knocking
stuff over. "I thought it was Bert at first because Bert likes to get into my stuff to wake me up for food, but Bert can't climb my bookcase..."
Thaaaaat made me wonder how many times it'd been through our room before I woke up o.O Nothing seems out of place in our room, so maybe it
didn't? Or just stuck to roaming via the floor?
Hubs thinks the squirrel had to weight a good 5 or 6 pounds, "That would have made a good meal!" Lol, I got a good look at it going out the front
door, it was the biggest one of the bunch we're aware of, whom we call "Diva". Diva appears to be the neighborhood matriarch, a bossy, pushy
jerk who gets all the seeds at the bird feeders before any other squirrel is allowed near it. I don't think the other squirrels would have missed her
much XD