Critter Drama

How it Began…

I woke up Saturday morning to the smell of burning rubber … or so I thought. It was mild in the upstairs hall, intensifying as I went downstairs. My initial assumption was that the lamps I now leave on at night, because of the crazy motorcycle man, were about to start a house fire.

Brady was under the weather, and the smell wasn’t dissipating by late morning, so I called Billy for the rescue. He took one sniff and proclaimed …: Valerie, that’s a skunk!” Yay me, a skunk in my basement.

Saturday evening, while the dogs were outside, I heard nails scratching on the vent ducts near the basement door. Needless to say, by Monday, the laundry in the washing machine required a fresh wash.

Billy returned on Monday and helped me clear out old paint cans. and doing a basic basement tidy in case I need to call someone for pest removal. We did discover tears in the dog food bag, furnace paperwork that had been on top of the vents knocked onto the floor, and a handheld vacuum that had been knocked off the stairs. The vacuum explained the loud noise I heard in the middle of the night several days ago,

We found a place where something had dug under the door threshold into the root cellar and apparently made its way into the basement. I tossed in rat poison, which will probably result in a rotting corpse under my house.

I’m currently leaving the basement lights on all night and have two trail cams on the way.

Somewhere in his celestial existence, my husband is probably chuckling and grateful he’s not here having to deal with this.

BTW, I’ve now decided it’s probably an opossum, so less fear of being sprayed, but they’re freaky-looking critters.