Hello all my friends in Blogland! Wow, it feels like it has been forever since I’ve been here. My family and I moved to a small cabin on 22 October and we’ve been without internet, phone, cell reception, TV and newspaper ever since! I ventured out to Starbucks today after dropping off Rana at her new school just to catch up on things back out here in civilization. The move went well and I’ve already completed a couple of projects that I’ll post more about later. For now, a little of our adventures out in the woods.
Granota was freaked out the first few nights in the cabin. Her bed is under the eave and she kept crying that she heard “fluttering” in the ceiling above her. We kept trying to pass it off as no big deal, showed her a tree branch that scrapes the roof at about that spot, even though we never heard this fluttering. Then one night she woke up and told me that there was scratching. I went in there and actually heard it this time. I knocked on the ceiling, figuring it was mice and that would be enough to scare them. It worked for that night.
The river running past our yard
The next night, we were all sound asleep and I heard scratching around 3:30. I sat up in bed and saw some small creature climbing up the support pole at the end of our room in the loft. It looked like a bat. I woke up Mr. Gren and told him we had a bat in the room and we sat there in the dark for a few minutes trying to decide on a course of action and quoting lines from “Christmas Vacation” (“I’ll catch it in the coat… and hit it with a hammer!”). I draped a sweatshirt over my head and crept by it to get downstairs to find a bucket, gloves, and a flashlight. But when I got right next to the little animal, I saw that it had a long fluffy tail. I had Mr. Gren turn on the lamp by our bed and got a better look at it. It was a small squirrel, but not like I’d ever seen before. It had brownish-black fur with tan patches on his sides between his legs; he looked really soft, like a chinchilla. He also looked very nervous.
A cousin of our little visitor
I went downstairs to get our equipment. When I got back up and we tried to knock him into the bucket, he jumped, ran across the floor of the loft, and then skittered down the log walls and sat on top of the front door. We tried to bump him off outside, but he was having none of that and we saw then what the tan patches on his fur were for. He leaped off the top of the door and went sailing several feet to my sewing table, scrambled across it, behind the fireplace, into the living room.
Now that's a fireplace
We chased that silly thing off the top of our armchairs to the refrigerator back on the other side of the room, to the tops of curtain rods, on the walls, of course, and finally, back out to the front door. By this time, I had added a broom to our arsenal and was using it to try and steer him in the direction we wanted him to go. And this time, finally, he went out! Hurray! The poor little thing was terrified, so I threw a few peanuts out on the porch as a peace offering. haha It took us about a half an hour to get him out of the house, and amazingly, none of the kids woke up through all of that! We haven’t had any more wildlife in the house since then, but who knows what’s going to happen when the weather gets colder…
Two Frogs and a Grasshopper 