Rock, Paper, Scisors… Mouse, Skunk, Cat

There’s something under our house. Since I’ve been up the past few nights with Vienna I’ve been hearing a scratching sound. Wouldn’t you guess it, the sounds is directly… yep, under Vienna’s room floor!  Why couldn’t it be under our floor where I would know/hear it come into the house if it is actually trying to do that, instead of making me paranoid that some animal is trying to get into Vienna’s room! 

Now, I’m not a pansy, I’ve lived with mice, I’ve lived with cockroaches, drunks in the stairwell and missing light bulbs in the hall.  In my soviet apartment living so close to others, you just accept that sometimes these things will be a part of life.  However, having a baby in the house… NO! Not gonna happen, Don’t like it, can’t stand it, won’t tolerate it!!  All those germs near my baby’s tiny little body… humm… yea…

So, I got Sam out of bed. He had to hear it!  Yeah, it’s somewhere between Vienna’s wall and the bathroom wall… but it sounds like it’s near the duct system, and it sounds MUCH bigger than a mouse.  So, we get dressed… sorta… and start searching for flashlights.  We look everywhere… we just bought a huge nice one, but all we can find are these two dinky little things… one of which is completely useless.  We head outside in the cool fall air and smell… SKUNK! It dawns on us how often we’ve smelt skunk in our back yard… so we walk the perimeter of the house looking for… I don’t know, anything that would give us a clue.  Not really finding anything we head back to the area where the sounds were coming from.  There’s a panel there that vents the dryer hose from the laundry room.  But Sam won’t remove it. He doesn’t want to face the back end of a skunk… but there is just the faintest smell of skunk, but you can smell it more down by the vent….

Now, my dad swears it’s not a skunk or we’d be smelling it in the house all the time.  Neither Sam or Dad are convinced it’s a mouse either.  That leaves cats.  There are several candidates in this area.  There’s Tanker (Yes, I’ve named the stray cats). Tanker is a gray male cat who has been hurt sooo many times. A few weeks ago he was limping really badly, but he seems better now.  He likes to lay in the sun in our back yard.  I don’t know if he belongs to anyone, but he doesn’t have a collar so I don’t think he does.  Then there’s Tiddles, the ginger cat… short for Tiddly Winks, cause he/she seems to wink a lot (he or she because it’s not as obvious as it is with Tanker).  Tiddles likes to walk around our place like it owns the place.  You’ll often find it on the front porch during the day or setting off our motion light at night. 

At this point I’m pulling for it to be a cat.  It’d be great, mouse deterrant and no stinkies.  But how do you find out??  I’m all for pulling off that panel… maybe we’ll have to do that this evening… I mean, what’s the big deal, I’ve watched Myth Busters. If anyone’s seen the skunk episode, they couldn’t get a skunk to spray them, and they had several remedies on there that seemed to work… besides it’s only temporary…. now to convince Sam that it’s worth his taking the risk ***big cheezy grin!!***

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