Around 8:30, a bat suddenly appears in the living room and starts circling rapidly. I nearly jumped out of my shorts. Guess I wasn't hallucinating Friday night when I saw the bat in the living room. I scramble down the hall to grab a broom and make sure the girls stay in the guest room with the door closed. I stationed myself at the door to the living room (again, no actual door there to be closed) and wave the broom every time the bat comes near to keep it cornered in the living room. After a few minutes of this, I call my mother-in-law downstairs to see if she has any ideas. She comes up and at first was going to call the police to see if an animal control officer can come over, but then decides to call our neighbor Bruce, who's pretty handy. He comes over with a net. In the meantime, the bat's getting tired and starts landing on a window screen, obviously hoping to get out. I didn't want to venture near enough to open the screen for fear of getting bitten, so I keep my distance.
Then the bat starts circling again. Right as Bruce walks in, I smack the bat and knock him to the floor. Bruce tells me to pin it down and he goes over to put the net over the bat and the end of the broom; meanwhile, the little critter is making this high-pitched cry. Bruce takes the captured bat outside and we set it free. I went back in, soaked in sweat, and start closing the windows, because that's the only way I figured the bat got in. I had sealed off the upstairs already. Deb got home a little while later and got a little freaked out after I told her the story. We slept in the guest room again.
This morning, I was back to work. I called a pest control company out of Peabody (Northeast Animal Control) that I found in Yellow Book and the guy eventually came by the house around 4:30. After talking to us and looking around the house, he had a couple of theories: When we had the gutters repaired and new boards installed to replace the rotting ones, a bat or bats may have been trapped inside. The only thing is I would think those things would have been fried up there with all the heat lately. At any rate, we didn't want him to rip out that new wood to look. The other theory is that a bat may have snuck in when we opened a door recently and has just been hiding out the last few days. I'm hoping that we just had the one bat and that we were able to get rid of it.
The bat guy checked out the eaves in our bedroom and didn't find any evidence that bats had been roosting in them. I sealed off a couple of possible entry points with duct tape for now and we just have to wait and see what happens tonight. We put the girls back in their room and I'm going to sleep upstairs with a broom nearby to see if we have any visitors; meanwhile, Deb wants to sleep downstairs. She's still a little freaked out by it all. Can't say as I blame her. So far, all is quiet as of 8:30 p.m. Hopefully, there will be nothing of import to report tomorrow.
UPDATE: It's Tuesday morning and I'm glad to report that the night was uneventful. Let's hope it stays that way.
Hop aboard the crazy train:
- Man, this anthrax investigation just gets weirder and weirder. I feel bad for that other Army scientist whose name was dragged through the mud back in '02. Meanwhile, the scientist who killed himself still hasn't been definitively tied to the mailings. But the details that have come out about him get progressively more bizarre.
- I'd say the bus trip from hell would certainly include a guy stabbing to death and beheading the guy sitting next to him. But then he went on to eat pieces of the victim's flesh, according to a police recording. WTF? The suspect was described as a hardworking former church employee who never showed any signs of anger or emotional problems. So what, he just went nuts? Yikes.
- Almost as crazy as that story is paying $14 million for photos of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's newborns. Seriously, they're infants. Give them a little time before they start to look like their parents.
No comments:
Post a Comment