Satan the Squirrel: Quantum of Solace

So what could be worse than a squirrel chewing through my shower wall while I was in the shower? The squirrel coming back, of course. Once a squirrel has shown that he is able to EAT your HOUSE at will, there is nothing that chills your bones as hearing that horrible chewing noise.

Termites? That’s nuthin’ compared to Satan the Squirrel eating your house!

(If you’re totally lost so far, this is the Sequel to my Satan the Squirrel post on Wednesday. If you missed it, you may want to start there.)

Fast forward a year to late 2006. I was QUITE great with child when we started hearing the scratching again. This time on the other side of the house, in our bedroom.

It made us twitch with horror and nervousness all over again.

Chris got an animal trapping cage (it always struck me as ironic that the cage’s brand name was “HavAHart”, which in our case was not at all true. We were just trying anything that we could at that point to get rid of him. I mean – if we’d caught him alive, we wouldn’t have trusted letting him go in even the remotest location of Alabama – he’d find his way back, just like he did every winter). He fixed StS a delicacy of Peanut Butter, Bird Seed, and other secret ingredients (he found the recipe off of some squirrel’s gourmet cooking site). Every night, he would climb up in the attic hopefully, and when disappointed, move the cage to a different part of the attic, slightly alter his hors d’oeuvres, or anything else he could think of in hopes of a better catch.

Unfortunately, neither the cage nor another effort that included a box of mothballs making our house have an unbearable stench tricked StS in the least.

It was mid-December when it all came to a head.

Ali is due January 7th. I’m already having contractions on and off (desperately hoping that they are more than they were), and we’re taking our childbirth classes at the hospital, learning all sorts of stuff about the process that we would rather not know.

We get home on Friday night from our class and head to bed around 11. I am having more contractions than I usually have had, and am REALLY hoping that they mean something. I’m laying in bed, paying close attention to my contractions, listening to Satan the Squirrel scratch while Chris is brushing his teeth. Then I happen to look up. I groan from the deepest deep of my gut. There are two holes in the ceiling to the left of the bed.

Editor’s note: Not only are there two holes in the ceiling, but these holes are in the EXACT spot that we had roof leakage three different times, which means that Chris painstakingly re-popcorned, primed, and painted three times. Why of all places StS had to pick THIS spot which we already hated, I will never know. Probably because his first name was Satan.

NOOOOOOOOOO. Dear God, do I have to tell my husband about this???

I finally call out meekly, “Hey baby, please don’t freak out. . . .”

He runs into the room. “What?? Are you going into labor???? Did your water break???”

“Noooo. . . . ” , and I let my eyes travel upward to the ceiling.

The blood drains from his face. I see him planning a military operation in his head. He promptly leaves (at 11pm at night while I’m still contracting) and heads to Wal-Mart.

This can’t be good.

The poor checkout lady. I bet she had to file some sort of “suspicious patron” report.

He comes home around midnight with the following catch:

• 3 cans of Great Stuff
• Pellet Gun
• Bullets
• Super Stout Rat Poison
• Bird Seed

He decides to go with what he knows best for his first try. He gets a can of Great Stuff, holds it into the hole in the ceiling (where we STILL hear StS scratching), and empties the WHOLE can of noxiously odorous, ozone killing neon orange foam into the ceiling.

The scratching stops.

We both envision StS, arms and legs and tail extended, frozen in place in the middle of a foam casket. We chuckle evilly and fall asleep, having happy dreams of sugarplums and dead squirrels.

The next morning before headed go back to our birthing class, Chris got up on the ladder to check out what he did.

Turns out, miraculously, that his unloading of the can actually PUSHED StS back out of the hole in the eave and had BLOCKED his entrance back into the house.

It was quite a lucky shot!!

So Chris patched the NEW awning hole, patched the dang bedroom ceiling, and we went to a voodoo doctor and bought twenty voodoo-squirrel-dolls in which we tortured every night before going to bed, and we never saw StS again.

Ok, we didn’t go to a voodoo doctor. But apparently Chris’ great skill with orange noxious foam got around in the squirrel community and they quit bothering us.

But despite the fact that we live 20 miles away from that battlezone, every time we see a squirrel, we look deep into their beady eyes, wondering. . . are YOU Satan the Squirrel?!?!