Wild Kingdom

For the past three days, we have had a chipmunk in the house. Thursday I spend much of the afternoon chasing it around the house, trying to herd it out the front door,or the back door, or the studio window; but every time it would zip off in another direction and hide. I also had a book cover that had to be finished, so I gave up and went back to work. Then I discovered Friday that the chipmunk had spent the night in our bedroom; being incontinent in the bookcase, the closet floor and behind the nightstand, (considering the cats were sleeping in there as well, no wonder it was nervous) so everything had to be cleaned, plus Stripey had attempted to have a hairball on J's feet. We had managed to push her off the bed, but not quite in time, so there was more cleaning (I am going to get rid of the carpet in there next Spring). Friday I tried just opening the doors and a window and working quietly, hoping that the chipmunk would leave on it's own. No luck, but soon there was a headless rabbit on the sun porch, and I stepped on a mouse tail in the hallway. More cleaning, and I shut the doors and windows again, and put the Havahart trap in the hall, which is a natural bottleneck for the house. Chipmunks tend to roam when then are inside, so I figured eventually it would run down the hall and try to use the Havahart as a tunnel-- and yep, and hour later the trap snapped and I was able to carry him outside and dump him out.

I went inside, made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and sat down at the computer to eat and look at dolls...and a hornet comes out of nowhere, lands on my plate, and starts to eat the back half of my sandwich. So I carry it to the bathroom, find a washcloth, squish the hornet, rinse and hang up the washcloth, cut off the hornety part of the sandwich with a knife, and go back to eating. The gray cat comes in and sits, and looks at the closet. A lot. So eventually I look in the closet too, and after removing a suitcase, I find that the gray cat has started a rabbit hutch back there, with a live rabbit so large (MUCH larger than the cat) it made me nervous enough to put on both gloves to carry it out. Then a lot more cleaning happened. J says we should get two more Havahart traps and put one in the bedroom and one behind the living room couch, and just leave them there, set. I objected that it would look weird to visitors, and he said he could make nice dovetail containers for them and no one would be the wiser. I think people would know perfectly well what they were, but I am getting them anyway.