Squirrels in the Attic, Bats in the Belfry.

damn nhood cats sometimes piss on the tires.

 

My best friend from growing up is restoring a 67 Camaro in an old garage next door to where his old man works. He comes over Tuesday night to lift weights and is like "you'll never guess what I found in the Camaro this morning."

I was hoping it was an alligator or small elephant, but apparently a stray cat had a litter of chipmunk size kittens where the passenger seat would be if the car wasn't completely stripped right now.

 

I had a possum make a nest and raise a family in the space between the master cylinder and the cylinder head of a 69 Mustang.

Boy did I get a fright when I lifted the hood and mama was there baring her teeth.

 

Years ago I left the top open on my miata for a couple days in a car port and came back to a very comfortable cat who was sleeping inside and had gotten hair over everything.

I had a pheasant take up residence in the grill and radiator of a nissan maxima after striking it at approximately 85mph.

On a much less amusing note, a friend once drove his then new(1995) Jauguar XJR that litterally had maybe 500 miles on it to his family farm. He parked it in the Morton building and drove a truck home that night. He got busy with work and didn't return to fetch it for several months. When he tried to start it....nothing... He had it towed in to the dealer who informed him that mice/rats had chewed the coating off most of the wiring in the car and engine bay. Rewiring bill....something like $15,000.....and the car was never the same again. It was haunted with electrical problems for the next year that he kept it.

 

The opportunity presents itself for me to tell this story quite often while out with people - usually at dinner - so I never tell it, because of how gross it is... But I'll tell it here...

It is not, unfortunately, a car story - but it's grossness is such that it's worth it...

While at "boarding school" some ten years ago in Westchester, NY, a young girl goes to the infirmary before classes start. She complains to the nurse of an ear ache... The nurse grabs her light and checks the girl's ear... With a gasp, she removes the light, turns it off and calls the administration building for a driver - immediately.

The clueless young girl, panicked, gets nervous... "What...? What is it...? What's wrong...?!?"

"Don't worry, sweetie," the nurse says, "everything will be alright..."

The young girl was rushed to the hospital where she spent - I believe - most of her day. A roach had crawled inside her ear while she was sleeping...






...and laid eggs...!!!

 

From now on, I sleep with the lights on.

 

I caught a squirrel in the birdseed bin last week, and figured the bungee cord would make it hard for him to get in.. Look what I found today.
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If you build a better mousetrap......

 

Another time, I was in the living room, watching television - with the lights off - and I got up to go answer the phone... I came back, sat down, picked my glass of soda up and proceeded to take a sip... I felt something light brush against my lip... Curiously, I put the soda down, went and turned the light on and took a look at the soda in the glass... Sure enough, there was a roach in there... I freaked out and started screaming; the counselor working that day was not pleased... I threw my sandwich across the room, shattering the plate on the wall... I never snacked in the dark while I lived there again...

 

That.........is disgusting...if not a bit revealing of her personal hygiene.

It's kind of hard to miss an ootheca if you're cleaning your ears regularly.

 

I would explain to you, in detail, exactly the kind of place this was, but you'd probably vomit just from reading it... Her hygiene may very well have had something to do with it, but the whole campus was roach-infested... The building I lived in at the time, when it was bombed, was estimated to have over 2,000 roaches inside the walls... You couldn't go anywhere without seeing roaches... You'd open the 'fridge and there'd be five or six of them in there... Inside the cabinets, inside appliances - you could take the toaster out of the cabinet in the morning - having just used it the day before - and shake it and roaches would fall out onto the counter...

The answering machine stopped working one day and no one knew why... When a new one was finally purchased to replace the broken one, someone brought the broken one outside and decided to smash it... So he threw it at the ground and it broke into a bunch of pieces and dozens of roaches scattered everywhere... So many roaches had inhabited the inside of the answering machine that it stopped working...

I hate roaches.

 

I'd never seen a roach in person until last summer when I worked on a campus in NC. I started hearing weird sounds at night and had no clue what it was. Then one night as I was lying awake listening to the weird noises, a roach crawled across my face.

Yeah but now I've lost my appetite for dinner.

 

I wish he had chewed through the bungee cord, those are only like a dollar and it would have cracked him across the face with one of those hooks.

 

I would've went absolutely, mind-bogglingly insane... Just the thought of that makes my skin crawl... I'm sure I ate my fair share of roaches in my sleep, too... Yeah, my appetite's gone as well...

 

If you build a better mousetrap, they will build a better mouse...

Find a poison you can put in the bird seed that won't effect the birds; there's your answer... - just don't eat the bird seed yourself...!

 

Yeah I went in tears to the girl next door and slept in her room. The next morning I made my boss give me another room. We went through three rooms before I found one that didn't have a roach or a spider. The other folks were from the south and thought I was a nut case. They sent me to the counselor. They didn't hire me back this year.

 

LOL...!

As much as I fear spiders, they're actually better to have around - they eat roaches... A room with just a spider in it is a room that used to have a roach in it... Keep the spiders and the Daddy Long Legs and the Dragon Flies... Get rid of the rest...

Raisins, anyone...?

 

One of our customers at FoD had his 360 coupe brought in because it would not turn over and he had placed the battery on a trickle charger. We found that field rats (he lives at the edge of town on some acreage) had gotten inside and chewed the wiring as stated in one of the posts above. We removed the bellypan and found the nest there. The rats had done pretty extensive damage and a lot of the wiring had to be replaced. He sold the house and moved into town.......

Also, one morning on a cold day I went outside to start my car to go to work. I heard a loud thump and some insanely loud screeching or howling or something that I cannot adequately explain. I shut off the engine and opened the hood to see what had happened to my engine. I looked right into the eyes of a terrified cat who was lodged between the intake manifold and the a/c compressor. Apparently the cat had gotten its tail caught in the serpentine belt when I started the engine and it was pulled into the small space. I had to call animal control to come get it out because I was not about to reach down and try to take an injured cat out by hand. Can you say mutilation and lacerations?????

The cat had a collar on so animal control said they would take the cat and contact its owners and have them come pick it up. You should have seen the gloves and the rod with a loop on it that the animal control guy used. That cat fought like he** when he pulled it out of the engine compartment.

NNO, good to hear from you........

 

Yep, you have to make your peace with the spiders, they keep the smaller critters down. The Wolf spiders we nurture are not aggressive, so we rarely see them. Our 4 cats, on the other hand love us so much they bring frequent gifts uh sacrifices. Mostly live field mice, sometimes small birds, sometimes half a mouse.

So back to the original question - my problem is mostly dirty footprints so nort so bad. Last night, I found that one of the cars had been in the trunk of the car, coming in via the greasy differential through the fuel filler tube access hole, and leaving greasy footprints and hair all over the car cover stored in there. Not too bad in the grand scheme of things.

 

Thanks, all is well with you...?

 

Yup, all is okay.............