Is wildlife invading anyone else on here? It's certainly after me. Within the last year, I've had dozens of squirrels, one raccoon the size of a bear and several small ones, possums, and a SNAKE in my house.

The raccoons made a hole in my roof and broke into the attic over the garage. I discovered them only after they had completely rearranged several years of Christmas ornaments. Oh my lord what a mess. I had a roofer come over and fix the hole and the next night there was this fat little peeping tom wearing a mask and grinning at me through the den window. Whew! Nearly scared me to death. I caught him though along with a couple of his brothers and a possum or two. I kept them in a 'have a heart' trap til the city came and hauled them off to burglarize someone else.

I'm always having squirrels in the attic and the weird thing is they love low voltage electrical wires. So far they've eaten the wires to the burgular alarm and the garage door opener. Once when I put Christmas lights in the big trees around the pool, they ate the wires so fast that the bulbs were dropping like nuts from the trees. Hate squirrels.

Then last summer, I was in the house by myself sewing something black when I noticed something curly and dark at the bottom to the stairs. Being nearsighted, I got up and went to where I thought I had dropped a zipper or something. When I bent over to get a closer look suddenly it MOVED. It was a SNAKE!! Boy talk about heart palpitations. My heart nearly jumped out of my chest. While screaming like a wild banshee, I grabbed a broom and held his head down but because he was on the carpet, he still wiggled and swirled his tail up the broom stick almost touching my hands. Still screaming, I somehow dragged him to the wood floor of the kitchen and beat him to death then collapsed on the couch and called my 8 yr. old grandson who was delighted to come up with a friend to carry the snake's dead, but still moving body to the creek.

I know there's some animal lovers who would theorize about saving those rascals, but I say it's either them or me. This is WAR!!

Any ideas for saving oneself from nature?

smile

[ January 06, 2004, 12:44 PM: Message edited by: smilinize ]

Yikes, did you ever bring back a "bad" memory to my mind.

I used to live in Arizona..and we had everything from Black widows, to scorpions, to snakes invading our house. I remember one time my ex-husband reached into the windowsill and came back w/a bite from a black widow. Emergency trip to the hospital and nearly 24 hours later he was fine.

Ex-husband would be out doing yard work and I'd hear screaming. I'd run out to see what was wrong and he's in the middle of the yard holding his leg and yelling for me to take his pants off. He'd strip down to chase scorpions out of his pants.

Then.. there was the time that I was sitting on the toilet, the tp was out, [of course] and I reached into the cupboard to get a new roll. But, sitting coiled up on the new roll of tp was a SNAKE!!!! Of course, later on I heard that it was a gopher snake or something similar, but to me, at that moment, it looked and acted like a rattlesnake and I wasn't going to stop and ask questions. I screamed and yelled and ran out of that bathroom so fast you'd think I'd caught fire!

Now I live in Florida and so far, the only critter to invade the home is lizards. They're not so bad, gives my heart a little start when I see one, but more than likely, they get in the house then starve to death. There's nothing like moving an end table or the sofa and finding dried up lizard carcasses.

The squirrels are a menace.. especially to our Christmas lights. We used to outline the house in white lights every year, but we've since stopped doing that. The squirrels would eat through the string of lights and short out a section so the house was always "un - outlined" in one area or another. As fast as my husband could repair a string of lights they'd eat through another or eat through the same one. They won that battle. Now we just decorate the yard.