I'm Just Hanging Around
I just *KNOW* those squirrels are turning my attics into a major disaster area. I say "attics" because we've got squirrels in both the attic over the garage and squirrels in the attic over the main part of the house. So I decide I'm going to climb up and take a look. Maybe it'll be so bad that I'll get mad enough to actually buy a bunch of that rat poison.
So which attic to check first? Access to the main attic is through a wee little hole in an upstairs closet. I'll have to carry the step ladder all the way upstairs and position it just right so I can fit in the closet, climb up the ladder, and squeeze through the access hole. Funny thing, the last time I tried to squeeze through the access hole up there, it seemed a LOT smaller than I remembered it from 10 or 12 years earlier. Hole must be shrinking as the house settles and dries out. Yeah - that's it.
The attic over the garage is difficult to get in for a different reason. The access hole is plenty big enough - I enlarged it myself about the same time the other access hole started to shrink. The problem is we have an awfully high garage ceiling, and you have to use an extension ladder to reach the garage attic. Must be 12 feet from the garage floor to the attic.
Since the extension ladder is still out from my last trip up to the roof, I decide to check out the attic over the garage. I extend the extension ladder and lean it against the back wall of the garage, just under the access door.
Then it's up the ladder. When I get near the top of the ladder, I move the attic's access hole cover out of the way. I grab a joist or stringer or whatever those boards that go from the garage ceiling to the roof are called, and discover that the friction coefficient of a concrete floor is not anything close to the friction coefficient of grass covered dirt.
As I'm pulling myself up into the attic over the garage, old man gravity does a number on my extension ladder. The ladder feet slide across the garage floor and there's a loud "BANG!" when the ladder hits the floor. So there I am - 12 feet or so above the garage floor with no way down.
My wife and her wheelchair are pretty mobile, but even if she could get out to the garage, there's no way she'd be able to lift the ladder. My teenage daughter is out with her friends. She may be home in 20 minutes, or she may be home in 6 hours - you never can tell. So it looks like I've got plenty of time to examine the attic to see how much damage the squirrels have done. Heck, I'll probably even have enough time to decide whether or not to put anything about this embarrassing situation on my web site (http://www.ccreations.com).
As I'm looking around and waiting for my daughter to return home, I happen to look down at the ladder, and notice there are oily streaks on the floor where the ladder feet slid across the floor. That doesn't seem right. Could the squirrels have gathered some peanuts, crushed them against the ladder feet, and thereby coated the ladder feet with peanut oil? Nawwww...couldn't be. Could it?
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One of these days I'm going to have to finish up the story. Explain how the last of the squirrels were finally evicted - by the raccoons. However, until I can get rid of the raccoons and write a happy ending to the story, this is about as far as it goes. Hope you enjoyed it.
If you've got a few minutes, how about taking a look at our customized magnetic-backed dry-erase fridge calendars (we can even put photos of squirrels on them) or our red hat name badge web site. Both products are pretty neat, and if we sell enough of them, I'll be able to hire someone to come and evict the raccoons! (it costs more to get raccoons evicted than it costs to get squirrels evicted).