Rather than go into great detail about why it’s been so long since I’ve written in here, I’ll just launch into a story about Sirry and a squirrel.

Sirry’s been sick for the past couple days. On Friday I go in to Rocket to work the first couple hours of Sara’s shift. When I get there, Jeff tells me that there’s no one coming in for Sirry. She’s at home and apparently feels like a wet rag that’s been run over by a large van. So I end up staying the whole night, even after Sara comes in. I actually try to leave once or twice, but Sara won’t let me. It ends up being a good thing, becuase it gets busy at the end of the night.

Anyway, CUT TO Saturday. I’m working again. Sirry calls me. I expect her to do the usual, “Thanks for working for me; I owe you one” routine, but instead she croaks into the phone, “There’s a squirrel trapped in the house!”

It seems she’s housesitting for Boss while he’s away in sunny Iceland. She goes by his house to water plants, stack mail and make certain the house is still standing. But today she finds that a squirrel has been running amok inside the house. It has chewed the doorframe, the window sills and everything else it could get its teeth into. Sirry surprises it mid-gnaw and it bolts into a little compartment in the fireplace. Now she’s calling me and demanding, “What do I do?” She can hear it moving around in the little hole, but she can’t see it and couldn’t reach it if she wanted to. She says she tried spraying Raid in the hole, but it only made the squirrel chirp and squeak for a moment.

So I tell her to block the hole. She is horrified by that idea. “I don’t want it to die!” Well, then stop spraying Raid at it, I tell her. And I’m not suggesting she starve it. I just think if she traps it, she can call Animal Control and let them come over and spray Raid at it. She says she’ll call me back.

She calls me back in an hour. She tells me that when she realized that the squirrel was hiding in a hole in the fireplace, she thought of smoking the squirrel out. So she tells me that she lit some paper ablaze (having obtained some from the pile of junkmail) and shoved it in the hole. The squirrel chirped and squeaked for a moment. Then it exploded out of the hole and flew out the front door.

Crisis terminated.

And I’m being figurative when I say the squirrel flew out the front door. You know that, right?