Critters, Creatures and A Little Bit of Craziness

We have a critter living under the deck.

And I know some of you are saying “Yes, we know, you’ve talked about that stupid bunny 10 times. Nobody is really interested in your bizarre bunny banter!”

First of all, while I am always a helpless slave to alliteration, that’s just rude. This is my blog and I can talk about whatever I want. But, more importantly, this is NOT the bunny but an entirely new critter. See, the deck runs the entire length of the house and the bunny lives on the far right end. The new critter, the critter of unknown identity, lives on the far left end of the deck. The end, might I add, that is closest to the back door.

No, this obviously isn't a real
bunny and this blog has nothing
to do with Pipsqueak Meow...but
this is a hilarious picture and
marginally relevant.

Which means every time I step out of the house,  I keep imagining some practically preternatural monster sticking a claw up through the boards of the deck, grabbing my ankle and dragging me down to its lair.

And if you’re scoffing at the idea of my slightly chubby frame being dragged through the tiny space between deck flooring, then you obviously haven’t read Stephen King’s short story The Raft in which a very similar thing is described in horrifying detail.

Since I have read The Raft, I can (and DO!) imagine my bloody, painful death every time I step onto the back porch. Plus, I’m having horrible flashbacks to 2005 when the vicious, mutant-sized raccoon and I battled for possession of my house.

An experience that should have taught me never to do critter research on the Internet.

But I get ahead of myself.  I should probably start by explaining how I discovered the presence of the critter. What happened was, I was out in the yard with the ridiculous dogs and I noticed a hole in one corner of the flower bed in front of the left side of the deck. I inspected said hole and thought to myself, “Self,” I thought, “those look ever so slightly like claw marks in the dirt around that hole.”

I consulted with the dogs and they not only agreed that we had a mysterious mystery on our hands but immediately began sniffing around the hole and then all along the side of the deck in their best imitation of drug dogs on the job.

Unfortunately, these are NOT drug dogs so they don’t realize that alerting the suspect that he (or it) is under surveillance is sub-par police work. Instead, they sniffed all along the left side of the deck, right up to the house, and both began barking and digging and running around like a couple of lunatics. Then they ran up the steps toward the back door and resumed barking and digging at the deck right in front of the back door.

Then I – also woefully poor at hot pursuit and thinking only of keeping the deck from doggy destruction – ran over, pushed Bubba out of the way and reached down to snatch Sassy up in my arms. And that’s when whatever is currently lurking under the deck growled at us.

At this point, I walked the dogs calmly in the house and told Opie we might need to call an exterminator.

Or, as he tells it, ran in the house with the dogs yelling about monsters and using the F word like a comma.

“It’s the bunny,” he assured me when we all calmed down.

“Bunnies don’t growl!” I retorted.

Except, of course, I have no idea if bunnies growl or not. I mean, I’ve never heard one growl but I don’t get into violent arguments with bunnies very often so I guess I can’t be sure.

And that’s when I made my biggest mistake: I started researching on the Internet. Which is not, you’ll be stunned to hear, filled with sweet stories of critters and and canines and Kimberlys living together in joyous harmony.

It is interesting to note that even in an urban setting, there are an alarming number of creatures that have been known to make their home underneath people’s homes…which means Opie had an entertaining evening in which I randomly shouted out possibilities, rabies statistics and other informative information.

“It’s the bunny!!” He kept insisting.

Which just goes to show you Opie doesn’t really understand the wily ways of wildlife. Plus, he wasn’t at all interested in listening to the various recordings of different animals growling and was unimpressed when I told him the skunk sound on this website: Critter Control sounded the closest to what I’d heard. He even went so far as to imply it sounded more like a whine than a growl.

Which also goes to show you that, as much as I love him, Opie isn’t really at the top of the animal identification game.

This is probably also why he didn’t want to come outside and help me tie the GoPro to the deck post above the hole in an effort to time lapse video the creature’s egress and ingress throughout the night.

So, the long and the short of it is, there’s a critter living under the deck, it might or might not be but probably is a skunk, and if I manage to get video evidence, I will only mention it to Opie once a day for the rest of our lives.

Crime and Canines

My life is weird.

If you're reading this blog you probably have already realized this; however, some days really drive it home more than others. Thursday was one of those days.

It actually seemed to start pretty normally...just a woman and her dog heading out to get their routine beauty treatments.

Sassy to the groomers for a trim and a touch up to her trademark boot puffs. Me to the salon for a trim and a touch up to the irritating grays that come not from age but from living a weird life.

See?  A perfectly puffed pup!

I was running a touch behind, so I grabbed Sassy, ran to the car and hurried on our way without really looking around. A minute or so into the drive I realized that the overhead light was on. "That's odd," I thought. And then I saw all the junk from the glove compartment was on the passenger seat.

"Someone burgled the car!" I told myself, glancing around. "Just the tire pressure kit and a whopping seventy-five cents in change. Unless..."

And I put my hand down into the console where I usually keep a set of keys.

They were gone.

If you are anything like Opie, you are now saying  "You kept KEYS in your CAR?"

It is interesting to note that Opie did NOT say "I have asked you 500 times not to leave those damn keys in the car!" even though he has, in fact, asked me about 500 times not to leave my keys in the car.

Opie, you see, is a very wise man.

Besides, when I called him I was already well into a a panic attack. "I hardly ever use those keys, they're for the vacation place.  But I can't remember if I had house keys on the ring.  What if I had house keys on the ring? What if I had house keys on it and the thieves have been watching the house, waiting for me to leave so they can break into the house?  Do you think that Bubba would scare them off?"

"I'll take care of it," he sighed and hung up.

But I had already jumped on that train of thought and was following it all the way to crazy town. "The sketchy neighbors!" I shouted to myself in the car.  "What if it was the sketchy neighbors who broke into the car, specifically to get the keys, and were waiting for me to leave the house.  They know about Bubba. If they're planning to break in, they must have some sort of plan to subdue Bub!  What if the neighbors are planning to BREAK IN AND KILL BUBBA SO THEY CAN BURGLE THE HOUSE?!"

And just as I was trying to decide if I should go into the salon, continue hyperventilating in the car, or dash home and save the Bub, Opie texted to let me know that he had called Janet (a good neighbor) and asked her to put one of their cars in our driveway and keep a general eye on the house until I got back.

Seriously, the man is a genius.

My mom is also a genius because she suggested later that random thieves wouldn't keep keys they couldn't use and maybe they dropped them in the lawn or street or someplace...and she was right!  The lazy thieves hadn't even taken them out of the car; when I got out of the salon, I found the keys on the floor between the passenger seat and the door.

I'm not going to lie, I actually danced around the parking lot a little when I found them.

In any case, this should be enough drama for any one day but, as I said, my life is weird.

See, Opie and I both thought I should call the police and file a report, just to make sure they know about crime in the area. So I did as soon as I got home and they sent an officer over to take a statement.  He was pleasant, said he'd have the overnight shift up the patrols of the neighborhood, and that it was probably just kids.

Overall, he thought I could kiss my seventy-five cents goodbye.

If I had a normal life, we would have said our goodbyes and continued on our merry ways.

But the entire time we were talking, there was this huge brown dog running around the neighborhood like a maniac.

"Do you know who's dog that is?" The officer asked me, interrupting himself to turn around and stare at the dog.

"I've never seen it before," I said.

"I don't like the looks of it," he muttered..

"I don't think it has a collar," I said. "It's probably just a stray."

And then the dog ran across our lawn, loped across to the backyard, turned around, ran back across our yard and across the street.

"I really don't like the looks of that dog," the officer said. "We haven't had a case of rabies in years but did you see all the drool around its mouth?"

"Maybe it's part chow," I suggested.  "They're big droolers."

At least that's what I THOUGHT I said, what he apparently heard was "Yes, that dog looks 8 kinds of rabid! Come on, cop, what are you waiting for?  Protect and serve, mister, Protect and serve!"

Because as the dog made another dash across the lawn, THE OFFICER GOT OUT HIS GUN.

I will now pause and let the ramifications of THAT sink in....and I will repeat for emphasis.

THE OFFICER GOT OUT HIS GUN.

Ever supportive of law enforcement, I did NOT scream "WTF are you doing?"  Instead I said, "You are NOT going to shoot that dog."

"I don't want to," he agreed.  "But if it's rabid..."

"It's not rabid," I assured him. "It's just hot from running around so much."

Oddly, the officer seemed unwilling to accept my diagnosis (he must not realize that I read A LOT of WebMD and therefore know all there is to know about rare illnesses). But the dog took off running again and, as the officer wasn't a lunatic, he obviously wasn't going to just spray the neighborhood with bullets...

Anyway, he put the gun away, called Animal Control to come deal with the dog, and suggested that I should go inside, just in case.

Which means that I had to spend an inordinate amount of time at our front window with my binoculars, looking for signs of a rabid dog and listening for gunshots.

I also had to spend a disturbing amount of time explaining to Bubba that he couldn't go into the backyard until I was sure the threat had passed. It is interesting to note that telling a whining dog "I'm saving your life, Bubba! Just like I've been doing all day!" and asking him "Do you want rabies,  Bubba?  DO YOU?!" does almost nothing to convince him the house is a better hangout than the backyard.

This is NOT the face of a dog who understands his peril.

So the long and the short of it is, my life is weird and our neighborhood has apparently become a seething hotbed of crime and questionable canines...and don't even get me started on the snakes!