Opossum Redux

Well, I spoke too soon when I said I rid the house of the opossum the other night. Kelly came to get me around 9 PM last night, saying she heard it scratching under the office floor. Tough little bugger, I thought. Since it didn’t get out the night before its been at least a week since it left the house.

I had to do something different this time. I remember during my weekend research that a good trick to know if an opossum has come or gone is to sprinkle flour at the entrances. If the critter makes tracks, you know its been there.

So that’s what I did. I opened a vent cover on the far side of the house and sprinkled flour on the opening. For good measure, I went to the opossum’s preferred doorway (the original hole it dug under the house), parted the brick pavers I placed above it, and gave it the flour treatment, too.

An hour later I was ready for bed but decided to check for opossum tracks before retiring. Sure enough, the one by the hole had been hit! There was flour not only on the pavers where I placed it, but flour pushed off the paver and onto the ground. Finally, proof that the critter was out!

I closed up the vent and hole again and went to bed. This morning there are no signs it tried to get back into the crawlspace – a place that might have easily been its tomb. Now to clean up the after effects and seal things up where this doesn’t happen again.

The Post-Amato Period

The writing’s been on the wall for a while now, but yesterday N.C. State lowered the boom on football coach Chuck Amato and sent him walking. State’s turned in a couple of losing seasons and could not turn it around – with no relief on the horizon. You can’t come in firing people up about national championships and then expect them to be happy with a 3-9 season. Especially when you can’t beat an otherwise completely pathetic Tar Heels team.

Chuck couldn’t keep his assistant coaches for one reason or another. I think that really hurt the Pack more than anything. Now the question is … what do we do now?

Call Me A Critter Gitter

For the past few weeks, we’ve been hearing scratches and bumps coming from under the house near the kitchen. My first thought was that our mice were back again, so based on that I placed a non-lethal trap in the kitchen near the noise and waited. When a week went by and no mouse took me up on the tasty crunchy peanut butter (it’s gotta be crunchy: the smooth stuff is poison to mice), I began to wonder what I was dealing with.

Around the time the noise started, we realized the wood damange to the front of our garage wasn’t simple rot but in fact termites. The damage they did was minimal and the site seems to have been dormant for a while but just for some peace of mind we called in an exterminator to set some termite traps. When the sales guy finished checking the crawlspace he had a curious comment.

“Is this the cat that’s been wandering around under the house? Bad kitty!” he joked as he dusted himself off.

“Excuse me?” I replied, perplexed.

“Oh I found some cat droppings under the house. Looks like something’s nesting down there, down by the kitchen area from the looks of the insulation.”

Hmm. We keep our crawlspace closed. How could anything get in there, I wondered.

Another week went by and I was planting bushes on the south side of the house. I noticed what appeared to be fresh cat droppings near the flowerbed I was digging, but something wasn’t quite right: cats bury their droppings and this was out in the open. I put it out of my mind and continued on with the other things I had to do.

Two weeks ago I cleaned up our garden area behind the house. To my astonishment, a cat-sized hole had been dug under the air duct leading into the house. Fresh claw marks were clearly visible in the mud.

Aha! The door of our uninvited house guest! Thinking I’d close the hole and deal with the consequences later, I piled the hole full of nearby, golf-ball-sized rocks and covered it with a brick step. That should do it, I thought.

The next morning I was even more astonished to find that every single rock had vanished! What’s more, a neat little tunnel had been dug from the existing hole to the other side of the brick step. A pile of leaves cleverly hid the entrance of the new tunnel.

I’m dealing with a worthy adversary, I thought to myself. I piled even more bricks on top of the new tunnel and considered it closed again. We went on Thanksgiving vacation with the hole sealed.

When we got back the scratching and bumps were still there, only they took on a more desperate sound. Yesterday offered me a chance to go under the house and investigate. Droppings were present around the corners of the house. Insulation was pulled down in places, often with leaves piled on top: nests! The metal screen of a vent opening had been shredded with the metal pulled inside – an effort to escape. I shook the leaves out of the insulation and carefully tucked it back into place, moving around the whole crawlspace in about an hour. Satisfied with my work and seeing no critters, I dusted myself off and went back inside.

Last night Kelly and I were watching a movie when the scratching returned. I leapt off the couch, grabbed the flashlight and ran outside, shining the light around the foot of the house. Two beady eyes glowed at me from behind a vent opening under the kitchen. Our mystery guest turned out to be an opossum.

As he wandered off the ledge of the vent and back into the depths of the crawlspace, I devised a plan to free him. A removed vent cover on the far side of the house was balanced so that it was easy to open from the inside and would indicate when it was used as a door. At the end of our movie, I walked outside to find it lying on the ground: the opossum was out! I replaced the vent cover and went to bed with the hope that the critter was gone for good. I’m not crossing my fingers, though.

From what I’ve read yesterday, !opossums are non-destructive critters who move slowly and are not at all aggressive. I suppose if we had to have something crawl into the house, its better that its an opossum than a raccoon or skunk. The challenge now is to keep the crawlspace secure through the upcoming mating season in January.

Ah, the joys of living on the edge of town!

Home

We’re home now after a fun few days with Kelly’s family. The travel wasn’t bad, either, as we avoided I-95 like the plague it is. Kids are in bed now, most of the things are unpacked, and I’ve got a good book waiting for me on the bedside table. Not a bad way to close out the day.

Happy Thanksgiving

We spent the day driving through this miserable weather to spend the holiday with Kellly’s parents in Virginia. As we were driving up Creedmoor road near Falls Lake, I saw the truck ahead of us startle a large bird by the roadside. The large flapping wings had me thinking it was a Great Blue Heron but as we got closer I was amused to find I was wrong. It was a big, honkin’ wild turkey! One lucky enough not to be joining its brethren on the kitchen table tomorrow. I’d have thought he would’ve been lying low this time of year.

Have a good Turkey Day, wherever you are.

Delta and US(eless) Airways Doing The Merger Dance

It’s been said that the fastest way to becoming a millionaire is to invest a billion in airline stocks. With that in mind I view the news that US Airways wants to merge with Delta. Even though they’re supposed to be the “hometown” airline with a hub in Charlotte, I hate flying US Airways. They’re one of the old, endangered, nickel-and-dime-you airlines. If they disappeared I wouldn’t miss ’em. I’ve merely tolerated them since they took over Piedmont Airlines and sucked all the friendliness out of it.

I have no grudges against Delta though, aside from the fact that I don’t like flying through Atlanta to get to anywhere else. Delta’s Atlanta connections simply aren’t convenient to me, and I rarely have reason to fly to Atlanta.

The upside to a merger is that Southwest might gain some gates at New York’s LaGuardia, which would be a welcome occurance – since I fly there frequently. The other upside is that there’ll be one less dinosaur airline to deal with.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

Well, I finally broke down and did it. Frustrated that I’ll never become a member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club For Scientists like some people I know, I dispatched with my hair altogether. I’m now a member of the no-hair posse, including Michael Stipe, Laurence Fishburne, Michael Jordan, Patrick Stewart, and Jimmy Buffett. Heck, even some local geeks have “the look.”

I’ll try this out this holiday season to see how it fits. If I like it, I may never use a comb again.

(Pics of this metamorphasis coming soon, of course.)