This past Friday, our friends Leslie and Oliver gave us a bed for our guest room. Oliver and I moved the bed over from his house using his neighbor's truck. When we were done moving the bed upstairs, I noticed that there was some dirt on our fireplace cushion. I didn't want to draw attention to it, lest Oliver think that Carolyn and I were filthy slobs. At first I thought that Carolyn had brought something home and placed it on the cushion. However, after Oliver left, I took a closer look at the dirt stains.

Those were animal paw prints! It took me a few moments for it to hit me. There was an animal in our house! I called Carolyn as she was still hanging out with Leslie, but she was almost home. I was freaking out becasue at this point, I wasn't exactly sure what kind of animal it was. It could be a small rat, or it could be a ginormous possum ready to bite my head off! Carolyn walked in and I told her the current status of my investigation. I grabbed a broom from the garage and came back ready to kill. We walked around the house some more and found soot marks, and little poo pellets lying everywhere.

I started flinging open the cabinets and looking behind furniture half expecting a rabid woodland animal to jump out and scare the bejeebus out of me. But my broom and I were ready for anything. At one point we thought that maybe it had come down the fireplace and then gone back out, but the pawprints on the cushion only showed footprints walking away from the fireplace (thank you, CSI Miami). Then Carolyn saw it. A large squirrel had made a home nestled in the middle of our wine bottle collection right in the open. Though we had been making all this noise while looking for the squirrel, it had stayed quiet and still the entire time.

What do you when you discover a wild animal in your house??? We had no idea, so Carolyn called two numbers: Animal control and our friend Katie D. Katie was more helpful than animal control. In the end, I went over to our neighbors Adam and Amy and asked if they could come over to help me run a squirrel out of town. Adam grabbed his broom and ran right over. Amy was less enthusiastic and was actually really scared. Adam and I decided that we would try to shoo Mr. Squirrel out through the sliding glass door and that we would try to erect some small barriers with cardboard boxes to try to guide him out. But first, everyone was concerned for the wine. So Adam and I pointed our brooms towards the rack while Carolyn went in to save two of the expensive bottles of wine sitting there. So far so good. Then Adam decided he'd try to hold a cardboard box up to the wine rack and perhaps coax the squirrel to casually walk into the box. That was not good.

At that point the squirrel freaked out! It jumped out from its hiding place and started running like crazy around the dining room. The ladies screamed and jumped up on chairs. Adam and I started chasing the squirrel around while trying to shoo it out towards the open door. It was running in circles, jumping behind furniture and also behind the tv. I used the broom to try to chase it out from the hiding places, while Adam worked on his hockey swing whenever the squirrel was in motion on the open floor. At one point it jumped back onto the counter table and Adam had a clear shot at it. He swung his broom like a baseball bat, hoping to hit the squirrel onto the floor and towards the open door. The squirrel gracefully jumped right before the broom hit, missing the broom by a mere inch. It jumped back onto the floor and ran a few more circles before finding the open door and escaping back into the outdoors.

Adam and I raised our brooms in victory! High-fives for us! We looked over at the ladies. In all the excitement, Amy had climbed her way up onto the kitchen counter and was hunched over across our low ceiling. Carolyn was super relieved that everything ended well.

We spent the rest of the evening cleaning stuff up rearranging our furniture back to normal. Later that night, we thanked God for how everything turned out. Though we had food out, the squirrel didn't eat anything or rummage through things. We had glass on the counters, but none of it had been knocked over and broken. None of our furniture was scratched up and nothing was chewed through. The squirrel had just come in to poop on the floor.