Arm the Dustbuster: I'm Going In!

We are under attack! You guys, it is all out war in Suburbia.

I think I just saw Wee ‘Burb carrying the portable vacuum cleaner and telling her fellow daycare dwellers “This is my ‘Nam, man, this is my ‘Nam.”

It started innocently enough. Since we bought our house a few years ago, Scott and I made the decision to live upstairs, despite their being a really nice master bedroom downstairs. It was born mostly of not trusting the little ones we planned on having not to burst into flames in the time it would take us to get upstairs. Monitors schmonitors, we went for proximity.

So we had no problem giving the room up to my friend who’s living with us awhile. Really we’d only been using it as a second closet and storage area for a ton of crap. Apparently, so had the bugs. My friend was nice enough not to mention it for a few months, but then she finally broke down and asked for a portable vacuum. Our regular one doesn’t have a hose, you see, and she’d been attempting to kill bugs with an old issue of Food Network Magazine, but it wasn’t cutting it anymore.

She had an invasion. I felt bad, and gross, and kind of dirty. But I just gave her the vacuum and let her loose. And left a few new magazines downstairs…the newer ones have more oomph when you smack the spiders, I hear.

Well, the troops moved North and it ain’t pretty. Internet,  meet my enemy!

Wikipedia will tell you it’s known as Boisea trivittata, but around these parts it’s known as the Box Elder Bug. Wikipedia also says “In late spring and early summer, groups of 50-200+ bugs may gather on house siding or brick, usually in a sunny spot. A month or two later there may be pairs of them mating, connected end to end, also in groups of three and four.”

So, let’s review, shall we? These damn things are having a bug orgy on my house, and the single dateless losers are taking shelter in my house…or, well, my vacuum as the case may be. And it’s OCTOBER! That’s neither spring nor early summer. WTF?

I had read a mixture of soap and water can do the trick, and Wikipedia agrees. But, let’s face, it, the man who took Caddyshack-like measures to kill a freaking gopher that was only TRYING to get into the house was not going to take the actual invasion lightly.

All I know is, he came in with a jug of something yellow and poisonous-looking, nodded and walked out the back door. And I’m informed there have been few sightings since.

All Scott is willing to say is “the price of war is eternal vigilance,” but he looks pretty smug, so something tells me nuclear actions were taken.

I'm Married to Bart Simpson

So the woodpeckers are back and apparently the owls aren't working. My husband's solution?

That's a slingshot! Scott gave specific instructions to both myself and my friend who is living with us. And then she asked the ultimate question: "Is this a shoot to kill situation?"

He replied: "You do what your conscience allows."

This Just In: Llama Mayhem!

One of my favorite things about living in a small town is the local newspaper. It is filled with a lot of feel-good stories and hilarious Letters to the Editor.

But even better than that...police reports! Like this one:

April 10. At 7:03 a.m. responded to report of llama on the road.

TOFURKY CAN’T FLY, CAN IT?

My first guest post! Allow me to introduce Lola (name changed to protect the guilty), the cheap cookie lover and formerly a neighborino of mine before I made the big suburban move. While Lola does not, in fact, technically live in a suburb, she has quite the suburban tale. I was witness to the subject of her story and knew I couldn't do it justice. So here she is! Lola, Internet...Internet, Lola. Take it away!

I have a stalker. A bald, beady-eyed freak I spotted holed up in a tree overlooking my balcony. “Hope you’re getting a good look there, you creep!” I shouted. “Gobble, gobble, gobble!” said the creep. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have a turkey in my tree. And before you all think that that’s some new euphemism or hip new band name, let me assure you that this is an actual turkey. The kind I enjoy at the end of November.

Of course, I may be wrong on that one and this is no ordinary turkey – this one can scale trees. Because I never in my life thought turkeys could fly that high or perch, like this sucker is doing. It’s the Superman of all turkeys. I guess it picked my tree as its Fortress of Solitude. Or maybe the punk enjoys intimidating the residents of my building, most of whom are over 80. In fact, there was a sign posted in the lobby of my building the other day that said management was well aware of the invasive feathered visitor and advised us to shoo the turkey away if it approached. “Don’t let the turkey intimidate you!” the bulletin warned.

Easier said than done. I have to admit to a bit of cowardice on my own part here, robust young whippersnapper that I am. But in my defense, at least the old ladies are armed with walkers! I had nothing but a Swiffer broom to defend myself with when I ventured out on the porch to check up on the damn bird. The unwanted visitor, in the meantime, had no intention of leaving. From the looks of it, it was settling in for the night. We both stared at each other for a few minutes. There’s no way the broom was long enough to reach the tree, I realized. I tried slamming the balcony door a few times, thinking maybe the noise would scare it away. Nothing doing. Finally, I gave up and retreated.

Now, I have some splaining to do. While my friend Stephanie is kind enough to post this as a guest entry on her Suburbia blog, I do not live in the suburbs. Not really. My neighborhood is considered to be within city limits so really all I should see up in my emaciated urban trees are either ACTUAL stalkers or maybe some delinquent city squirrels. Perhaps a gimpy pigeon or two. Not nature in all its untamed glory. Certainly no evil little bald heads glaring at me with their beady eyes.

Maybe some of you will think I’m being too hard on the turkey. If the Turkey Defense Council or People for the Ethical Treatment of Turkeys are reading this, don’t e-mail me! In my defense, I didn’t go at it with a broom nor did I chuck any fruit at it, which, by the way, was readily available.

The next morning, I went up to the balcony window. I had to make sure the whole turkey experience wasn’t just a hallucination. The tree was empty. I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when I noticed something much less savory than a fat turkey with no regard for zoning restrictions or personal property. That something was a dead squirrel. Lying on a tree branch. Smack-dab in front of my balcony. Did I mention it wasn’t moving?? Suddenly, I caught myself wishing for the return of the turkey – a big but live animal would still smell better than a small dead one.

My eyes were still glued to the little furry corpse when said corpse suddenly twitched and sat up. Before I could drop on my knees and shout “Hallelujah, it’s RESURRECTED!” the squirrel yawned, stretched and looked around. It looked grumpy and had a bad case of bed head. Or branch head, I guess. Then, just like a true night owl forced to rise early, it groggily started making its way down the tree. The little bugger’s morning ritual was so human, I was half expecting it to scratch its ass and then grab a donut and some coffee. For all I know, it was heading to Starbucks.

Before I could do anymore musing on nature and its weird ways of interacting with me, I realized I was going to be late for work. So I grabbed a donut and some coffee and groggily headed out the door. At least my hair wasn’t a mess. That squirrel needs to get its paws on some styling products.

Louie, Louie: He Gotta Go!

“Is that @#$@$#ing Louie again?!?!” I screech in disbelief. I hear a laugh from inside the kitchen and possibly a muttered “I told you so,” though fortunately my husband is smart enough not to outright taunt a pregnant woman.

In fairness, he did tell me so. Over a year ago when we moved to the ‘burbs and I proudly told him we had a chipmunk of our very own, he warned me it would be nothing but trouble. And two days later when we started hearing what sounded like digging coming up from our floor boards, I got THE LOOK. Going out to investigate, we found that the chipmunk had burrowed under the concrete of the stairs out in the front of our house, and was most certainly trying to dig his way into the comfort of our newly purchased home.

I immediately told Scott that he could not kill the chipmunk. I’d even given him a name: Louie. I repeated over and over “you can’t kill Louie.” Louie to me signified one of the few benefits of living in the middle of nowhere: wildlife. Every morning I would go down and do the laundry or work out in the basement and I would see Louie sitting on the deck, eating seeds from the trees and plants in our yard. There was something bucolic and comforting in this, and so when I saw Scott reaching for the keys to go to Home Depot, I put my foot down.

What followed was something out of Caddyshack as he tried to find non-violent but effective ways of letting Louie know he was not welcome INSIDE our house. First he tried putting a hose down the hole. No wet chipmunks came running out, and two days later we heard the scratching under the floor boards again. Plan B was stuffing the hole with a broom, assuming it would somehow keep Louie out of his hole long enough for him to get the picture. I was sure this would result in a call to our neighborhood association as Scott hadn’t bothered to break the broom handle, and so we really just had a huge yellow broom sticking out of our stairs for weeks. But somehow, Louie still appeared on the deck, we still saw him running around the yard. Though no digging, which seemed to pacify my husband, if not worry me a little.

Unbeknownst to me, Scott had taken, shall we say, other precautions. By shoving some gopher poison down there, figuring if it was enough to kill a gopher, it would be more than enough to kill the chipmunk. I found out when I caught him delightedly looking at a pile of green slime on the steps about a month after the broom incident. After considerable cajoling, he admitted he was convinced it was the barf of a dying chipmunk and he had prevailed. While I reconsidered who I had married, I kept my eyes peeled, sure Louie was the survivor I thought he was.

And a month later, the digging sound returned. Far as I was concerned at this point, Louie had earned his right. The damn chipmunk has 9 lives, let him run in the yard. He’d failed to get into the house up until this point, it was unlikely he’d really chew his way through before winter. Somehow Louie sensed the war was over and he’d won his nest, and he actually stopped digging and when he wasn’t sitting on my deck or sunning himself, things seemed quite peaceful.

So why then, you my wonder, was I now cursing Louie’s name so violently? Well, the initial problem with our little arrangement was we had gotten a puppy. And about a month after getting her, she figured out she was supposed to chase animals, including Louie. So from upstairs I hear the puppy scratching at the door. Problem 2? I’m pregnant and getting up and down the stairs isn’t exactly the easiest thing these days, so to go all the way down to find out that the puppy was not, in fact, in danger of piddling my floor, but rather was being taunted by my former chipmunk friend was a bit of a kick in the head.

But the absolute LAST straw happened about a week ago and was what led to my salty tirade. Because of previously mentioned Problem 2, my body temperature is about 10 degrees hotter than normal and so I am constantly sitting with the windows open and the fans going. This means I have to get used to certain ambient noises of suburbia — lawnmowers, neighbor’s conversations, ball games going on in the park down the road. And birds, oh the birds!

All day I was listening to insistent chirping and I finally had it, went outside and got ready to scare whatever bird was sitting in my tree. Previously mentioned Problem 2 also gives me a bit of a hair trigger temper, the truth must be told. Anyway, I see no bird. What I DO see is Louie looking at me from the tree hanging over our top-story porch. I am watching what looks like a little chipmunk barking, only it’s making this horrible high-pitched chirp. I try doing a quick “HEY” screech that usually scares the squirrels, but as already discussed, Louie is made of tougher stuff. He moves not an inch.

This goes on for days. I’m trying to take a conference call and there’s Louie chirping. I’m trying to watch TV and there’s Louie. Insistently chirping to a point where I am actually missing him dig under the floor boards. I throw things, whatever I can find. I even am tempted to throw a flower pot before I realize it means more yard mess I have to clean up, and since the dog is outside all the time, the last thing I need is an emergency vet trip to remove flowerpot remains from her trachea.

The upshot is this: the detante Louie and I reached last year when I was newly engaged and new to the ‘burbs has been replaced with homicidal plans of my own. I WILL stop the chirping. If anyone has any ideas for humane ways to do so, speak now or forever hold your peace.