Red Squirrel...

I hate red squirrels.  I hate them with a passion.  They may be cute but let me assure you, they are evil.

Years ago, I met the devil himself.  Not in Hell, but in my bathroom.  We have an old house and at the time, our roof had developed a leak.  The ceiling in our bathroom was a ‘tile type’ of ceiling.  Sort of like a suspended ceiling.  So, when the water leaked in from the roof, it caused some of the tiles to separate. The leak was so bad that when we had a heavy rain we had to tack up a shower curtain (it was a pretty pink one) and channel the water into the sink.  Man, those were good times…

It wasn’t long after, that I noticed the ceiling tile seemed to be coming apart from the seams.  Shortly after that, I noticed the cats were spending an abnormal amount of time in the bathroom.  Then it appeared that someone or something was continually knocking things over onto the bathroom floor.  Then he appeared.  I watched him escape certain death from the jaws of our ferocious feline and disappear through the hole in the ceiling tile. 
We tried to block up the hole but the damn squirrel kept chewing at the tile to get in (I even tried duct tape…talk about ghetto).  This little game went on for quite some time.   Then finally, the day of reckoning arrived and the showdown began. 

There we were, face to face.  I was standing across the room, next to the door (which was closed by this time).  He was perched on our pink sink.  His eyes met mine and that is when it happened.  He spread out his arms and lunged at me.  Now it just got personal.  Game on my little friend….GAME ON.  For those of you who don’t know, our bathroom is huge.  It is actually a combination bathroom/laundry room and the walls are a type of weird textured wooden panel which gave the squirrel a distinct advantage.  But I was determined.  I would not lose to such vermin.  So, with a wooden stick in one hand and a plastic laundry basket in the other a chased that damn thing all around the bathroom (I may have been yelling and screaming during this stage of the process). 

Did I mention that my husband was in the kitchen holding our screaming 3month old,  yelling to me, “ Will you PLEASE just leave it alone and get out of there!?!?!” to which I responded something to the effect of, “ Hell NO!  I’m ‘gonna’ get him!”  That poor man.  When he said, “I Do” he had no idea what he was getting into.

Shortly after this brief verbal exchange, Big Red pulled a matrix type move and was literally running across the wall (no joke; I think it was the texture in the wooden wall paneling).  Luckly, I was there with my laundry basket and was able to catch him….on the wall.  That’s right, I was holding the basket against the wall with a trapped, pissed off, angry red squirrel in it. In the 10 seconds I had to think about what to do next, the squirrel manage to chew through the plastic netting and proceed to use my arm and back as an escape bridge. 

At this point I just started to cry and heeded my husband’s advice to ‘get out of there’.  We called Fish & Game who sent a lovely gentleman to our door.  He was able to catch our little friend within 5 mins (who knew a little trap would be easier than chasing it around with a stick).  Since the squirrel had scratched me, they would need to test for rabies. Which meant they would have to cut its’ head off.  Usually, I would feel bad about this sort of thing but not this time. Nope, he had it coming.

As the Fish & Game man drove away and Big Red prepared to meet his Maker, I headed off to the doctor’s office for a tetanus shot. Clearly, there were no winners that day.

Even now, as I think of that day, all that comes to mind is “Damn you little Red Squirrel….damn you.”