Dotty Parker

the menagerie

I know that I've written about the animals that inhabit my house. I write about the dogs all the time. I've mentioned snakes, squirrels, mice, bats, and bugs. We had another visit last week! I heard him in the ceiling and wondered how we were getting mice again, when it had been so long since we'd had them.

Well, we weren't getting mice again. It was a bat! In daytime. I think it was getting near to time for him to make his rounds and eat things. This time, instead of Spring alerting me, the ThaiPrincess started shouting, "Dotty! Dotty! Can you come here please? I don't know what to do!"

It wasn't a panic type shout. It was more the kind like, "Hey, can you come here right now because I'm holding shards of very pointy glass and I can't open the door to the cabinet where the trash can is and I think I'm going to cut myself any second, but I little cut wouldn't be too bad, but I really do need you here fairly quicky." You know that kind, right?

She was there laughing a little and freaking out a little with a pillow over her head and arms, and her legs drawn up under her as much as possible. Like a lifeguard in the kiddie pool, I pulled her to the safety of the stairs and closed the curtains that we have there to keep the hot in the winter and the cool in the summer from mixing with the opposite kind of air. (Incidentally, I would quite like to discover a way to bottle the stuff we keep separate. If we could take the freezing cold upstairs winter and let it loose a bit in the downstairs summer, we'd be a lot better off.)

Inside the safety of the curtains, we developed our battle plan. We would open all possible doors (2), get a large box or bag (she got the box, I got the bag), and try to either guide him out of the door by holding up the box or bag in front of him so that his sonar stuff would get all ticked off, or by catching him in the box or bag and letting him loose outside.

We managed, we think, to get him to fly outside. But we didn't see him go. We're still moderately afraid that he's going to come back just to see how scared and surprised we'd be. They're happy bats, the kind that don't bite, but it's so weird to have a flying mouse in the house that I don't really want anymore of them here.

the zoo goes home?

I'm very excited. We're having the house insulated so the bat/mouse/animal problems may decrease significantly! Yeehaw!

Posted by dotty at July 5, 2003 11:35 PM