Friends.  Since the day we moved in we have been beating back the wildlife (i.e. mice, bats, and squirrels) and trying to make Mac n’ Cheese Manor ours and ONLY ours.  Don’t get me wrong, I love all creatures, great and small, but I love most of them not in our house: dogs and cats notwithstanding . . . and maybe someday a pot-bellied pig . . . and maybe a mini pony that can come inside sometimes . . . or lots of times . . . do they make mini pony pet doors for houses?  Anyway, I digress . . .

Our efforts have not been entirely futile.  We have removed two bats (safely and with zero human or bat casualties), we have removed countless mice (safely for us . . . not always so much the mice),  and then there are the squirrels.

We have live trapped and removed exactly one squirrel.  We have three live-traps.  We have baited them more times than I care to list, and always the bait is gone, the little door is down, but the trap is empty.  We’ve made modifications to better our chances of catching the little monsters, all to no avail.

In the thirty or so minutes since I’ve been sitting on our couch writing this post, I’ve heard one (or two?) run up through our living room wall to get to the upstairs.  And this morning, when Carl pulled on the retractable power cord to plug in our iron, bird seed literally poured out of it:
Which means we were likely wrong when we thought it was my sweet Sunshine who poured birdseed into my rain boots last week . . .

In light of all this, we are switching from live traps to not so live traps, and we are getting a cat, and I’m moving the birdseed into an old dog food bin with a lid that clicks shut.  We may have lost the last few (okay, maybe all previous) battles against the squirrels, but we are going to win the war for our beautiful, much-nibbled Mac n’ Cheese Manor!