Friday, September 26, 2008

The Shrew Incident

Dude.

SIL and I BONDED, hard core, last night.

Some background information: I was wearing a skirt and three inch stiletto heels. She is a wildlife biologist. She’s staying in our basement guest room, which has a large egress window in it.

She opened the window when she got home because the basement can get kind of stuffy. A shrew (small, mouse-like creature) came in the window and darted across the bedroom into the bathroom.

I was upstairs at the time, just coming in from work, and I thundered down the stairs when I heard her shrieks. She shut the shrew in the bathroom and we quickly located a shoe box and, in the absence of a broom, a roll of wrapping paper. Shut up.

We could handle this. Two smart, educated women, one of whom was able to properly identify and classify the critter as she chased it into the bathroom. How hard could it be?

I never thought I was the kind of girl that screams at the sight of a rodent. Turns out I am. So is SIL. The two of us were standing on the toilet seat (not the lid, the seat, and I feel that I must point out the 3 inch heels bit again), holding each other and shrieking for all we were worth.

We got a bigger box, one that took up nearly the entire bathroom floor, and chased the shrew into it. We then hauled the box upstairs (both of us for one mostly empty box), and tossed it into the driveway.

The mister showed up a few minutes later and came into the house as she and I were both settling onto the couch with beers, still a little jittery.

“What’s with the box in the driveway?” he asked, puzzled.

“Rodent.” “Basement.” “Box.” “Broom.” “Driveway.”

He somehow pieced together our story and laughed so hard he cried.

2 comments:

MOLLY said...

It's ok to scream when animals enter your house. Whenever we get a bat in the house, I crouch on the ground with a blanket over my head, screaming like a sally. They're harmless, but for some reason, I'm convinced I'm going to be attacked, mauled, and slowly eaten to death by the little bastards.

Buster said...

I don't even know what happened. One moment I was find, if slightly ooked out by the presence of an uninvited furry critter in the house and the next I was screaming and jumping up and down and in an absolute panic over the RODENT in my HOUSE. AHHHHH!