Murderer

Boy, it seems like every time we start digging around in nooks and crannies of this house, we find a creature of some sort. Remember the skunk from back in the winter? I don't think I ever ended updating what happened with that little guy. Well, Craig ended up waiting until the shunk was out prowling one night and he blocked the entrance to the burrow with a cinder block. Craig went back a half dozen times over the next few days to make sure the block hadn't moved and to make sure that there wasn't someting under the house still that he had blocked in by mistake. I didn't want the skunk dying under there!

Fast forward to May. With the warmer weather, we started to smell something odd outside and through the heat register in the playroom. Craig started rummaging around in the basement ceiling that abuts the playroom addition and found dead mice in the ceiling. Wonderful. But that wasn't the source of the smell. No, no. Long story short, the skunk ended up dying under the playroom and that's what we were smelling! Craig had to drag it out with his hockey stick, of all things, along with all the insulation from under the addition since it all reeked of skunk! It was completely covered with maggots and stank to high heaven. Then the garbage men wouldn't take it because I'm a terrible goody-goody and actually told them there was a dead skunk in the bag, so Craig had to ride his bike to the closest variety store and dump the skunk in their dumpster out back of the store. So now we have to reinsulate the crawl space under the playroom addition before winter so we don't all freeze our tails off when the snow starts to fly.

Then last week I noticed some wasp activity around the chimney on the outside of the house. Craig went out and bought a can of Raid and, sadly, killed the hive. Well, thought he killed the hive. There was even more activity there the next day so Craig decided to investigate further. He ended up having to pull off part of the siding and found a MASSIVE wasp nest under there. In his attempt to reach all of the nest, Craig had to remove some insulation from the underside of the chimney. There were THOUSANDS of wasps all going berzerk because here's this guy spraying them with poison. Thankfully, Craig didn't get stung once but I wanted to cry when I saw the piles and piles of dead wasps and the thousands of larvae at varying stages of development. Whenever Craig would knock a new section of the nest down it would reveal another nursery section. Adult wasps were frantically trying to protect the larvae and some that were nearing being ready to hatch were trying to crawl their way out of their little hexagonal coccoon. It really was sad but I couldn't risk them getting inside the actual fireplace inside my house.

I feel terrible because since we moved in 7 months ago, we've killed a skunk (unintentionally but he's still DEAD), found 3 dead mice in the ceiling and destroyed a wasp nest filled with babies. I guess I can justify it by remembering that our backyard served as host to no less than 3 nesting bird couples. One of those couples, the robins, had three clutches of 3 babies in each clutch. Hopefully the wildlife will remain in the wild and stay away from our house.