I had two very different stories rolling around in my brain when I sat down to write today. I’m choosing the less angsty one. Also, I’m too tired dig too deep into what patriotism means to me in this current environment. So here is the second story which sort of explains why I’m too tired to do any deep digging.

We knew something has been coming into the house at night or attempting to because most nights we close the kitchen pet door. We’ve just gotten used to the idea of letting the cat fend for himself at night, but there have been a few nights when we’ve forgotten to close the door. Josephine knows when it is not the cat. She just knows. I mean, she’s a barker. That’s what Schnauzers do, but she reserves her barks for outside. Something is seriously off if she barks in the house. Every time she’s gotten out of bed in the crazy morning hours to bark at the bedroom door, I’ve scooped her up and placed her the bed with a firm ‘wait’. Then I quietly open the door to go investigate and every time, the coast has been clear with the dog door in place. Then I open the bedroom door and Josephine tears out of the room, snarling, grunting and barking through the dining room and kitchen and out to the backyard.

I never see anything. It is all just an illusion or an idea of something, a presence and I kind of feel like I’m going crazy.

Chris, Amy and I decided for our last year in undergrad to move out of the dorms and get an apartment together. We searched relentless for an apartment and finally landed the top floor of a house that had been converted into apartments. It was a total dump and landlord was reluctant to rent to college students. I think the only reason we got the place was because Amy walked into the office with a check for a down deposit before the landlord could could change his mind. Good lord, the work we put into that place. All the cleaning and painting, but it was ours. We bought groceries and cooked meals. We hosted so many breakfast for dinner nights.

Then the mice came.

So many mice.

It started out small, a loaf of bread with teeth marks puncturing the bag. Then we found mouse droppings on a can of soup. Every time we found evidence, we’d clean out the pantry, set traps and then buy new groceries. But things escalated and we’d find the evidence of mice in more than just a loaf of bread or on a can of soup. We threw everything away, completely emptied the pantry and started eating out for all of our meals. Chris kind of snapped when reached this point. There was one evening when we had just emptied four mouse traps. Chris reset them and then we started putting our shoes to go out for pizza. I hadn’t even gotten my laces tied before we heard the snaps of all four traps going off. Chris built a maze out of cardboard and he’d sit in wait for mouse to come out and get trapped in the maze. Then he’d use a can of hairspray and a lighter to make a flame thrower. I don’t know what the result of this was. I did wake up one night to the sounds of him beating a mouse to death with a dustpan.

Shit got dark.

We did eventually manage to rid ourselves of the mice and our lives returned to normal. Breakfast for Dinner night came back, but I have trauma. I don’t just obsess about mice. If I wake up with a bug bite, I immediately start questioning. Is it bedbugs? Fleas? Both? Do I need to clean my house with fire? If I see one mouse, I am one hundred percent convinced that somewhere in the walls or attic of my house there is a whole cast of mice from Ratatouille living it up. So this thing with the our early morning visitor/s is just kindling for my panic fire. We’d finally settled on the idea that we had a stray cat sneaking in to eat the cat food and I was okay with that. Then, at 5:00 Tuesday morning when Josephine barked at the bedroom door and we went through our usual routine, during my initial scan of the dining room, I saw it. There he was, a small raccoon sitting on the bench, inches away from the cat food bowl. I looked towards the kitchen door and sure enough, the pet door had been left open. I looked at him and said “Okay…you have to leave now.” Then he looked at me in a way that said “Are you sure?” I nodded my head and said “Yeah. You need to go.” And he left.

At least I thought he left.

Instead, he and a friend scurried up the wall and tucked themselves into the corner near the garage door. So when I thought it was clear and I let Josephine out, she went straight to that garage corner and started barking her little head off. Getting them out of the garage was not easy. I had to wake up Michael, but did manage to spook one of them out by opening the garage door. The second one, the one who was all “you sure I have to go?”, that one had to be shot four times with the garden hose before agreeing to leave the garage. I guess I kind of feel some relief now that I know what has been coming into the house. They’ve been really nice and polite for raccoons. They haven’t gotten into the garbage or tried opening the fridge. They haven’t pooped in the house. Really, the only evidence they leave behind is an empty cat food bowl. The one I had a conversation with is actually really cute.

EXCEPT THEY ARE WILD ANIMALS!

We’re back to square one, spraying the yard with fox urine and setting the trap. We caught a possum in that trap last nigh/this morning. I have an unopened Costco sized container of fox pee crystals and my next plan of attack is to leave large piles of it around all of the doors. I’m waiting to do this until the night before we leave for vacation to maximize the repellent. If this doesn’t work, well…I guess we have new pets.

Maybe I’ll call them Flim and Flam.