Attack of the squirrels

The property that my house is on seems to be prime real estate for squirrels - not that it's big or even far away from anything industrial considering we live on a fairly busy and active street.  Needless to say we've had bad luck with squirrels.

Years ago my dad had to string up wires over top of the pool to hang down shiny ribbons to distract birds flying and squirrels from jumping down from trees into the pool - trust me, as ludicrous as that sounds, it happened - but nevertheless we have had the occasional aquatic daredevil paddling around.  Apparently, squirrels love above-ground pools.  So much so they'd die for it.

Last year, my parents took a multi-week vacation to Europe, and because I'm still jealous of where they went and what they got to see as my sister and I starved ourselves alone, I won't say anything more about their trip.  Anyways, my sister and I were indeed left alone to fend for ourselves, cook meals, find the willpower to force ourselves to go to school or work at a time where the disappointing eye of a parent upon a skipping delinquent child.  One unfortunate morning (I have a feeling like I was hungover, too), my sister, her friend and I found a dead squirrel floating in its watery above-ground grave.  Given that the jets in the pool make a constant clockwise current, this dead squirrel made its slow rotation around and around, making my stomach turn every time it floated in front of us on the deck.  We have no idea how this squirrel got there - it's sad, actually - but I couldn't bring myself to remove this dead thing from the pool.  I tried; we used the pool net, but I felt almost nauseous when I felt the dead weight in the mesh net and couldn't do it.  My sister and I being the gracious guests that we are, we made her friend do it.  Out from the pool, straight to a garbage bag - what were we supposed to do? - and they drove it to the park up the road to dispose of it.  As I type it now, that just sounds wrong.

What made things more disturbingly disgusting was, when my sister and her friend had a baseball game that night in the same park, they went to the garbage bins and had a vigil for the departed animal.  Sick.

Last week, as I lay in my hungover stupor, I started the HBO comedy Veep which I find to be hilarious.  As I was uncomfortably horizontal in the living room couch, I heard a loud noise against the window by my head which startled me and my headache.  I looked to find a squirrel on the window ledge, looking directly at me - but not at me, but into my goddamn soul, my goddamn soul.  I hit on the window a few times until it disappeared, but it was then that I saw it had scratched a hole through the window screen.  Minutes later I heard more thrashing outside, and I alerted my mom who said I was hallucinating a squirrel attack.  I took it as nothing.

This past week I was informed by my parents when I got home from work that a family of squirrels had made a nest (do squirrels make nests?) somewhere on the property as the amount of squirrels fucking around was staggering.  After some time my dad found it, and I can barely explain where exactly it is, except for it's by the corner of the roof so they'd dug through the.. house? and into where our attic is.  Either way, it's directly outside of my parents' bedroom window, so my dad got on the roof outside of these windows and blocked the hole up from the squirrels with something I don't know the name of.

What ensued was a chaotic melee of squirrels all over the place.  From the windows we witnessed a squirrel, now a pair of squirrels, now a pair of different squirrels all running around.  Singular squirrels stood on the roof, upset, and I got similarly upset when my mom goes "oh, it's the babies, and they're confused without their mother!"  I need to say that I get emotional about animals.  I don't give a hell about how lame that sentence is, and I'm certainly not a bleeding heart animal lover.  But the moment that I think of animals having emotions, or families, I get upset.  To think that baby squirrels were panicked without their mother made me depressed, and I get upset thinking about it now.  For the few days after we still saw various squirrels running around, so something was up.

Yesterday morning, I awoke to my dad scraping something on the roof.  Turns out he was reopening the blockage he had made to investigate, and as he worked, he was getting attacked by malicious squirrels from the exterior.  (my mom, meanwhile, hung out of the bedroom window with a broom hitting them away) My dad tore through the blockage and out rushed three squirrels who were trapped in the house - and that would explain the high frequency of squirrels on the property, who were still scurrying around trying to find a way back into the attic to free their trapped family.  (see, again, I get upset thinking that those three squirrels may have been trapped away from their mother) Apparently - and, again, I missed this - the third squirrel jumped out and actually attacked my dad, but he recounted this story while piss drunk last night.

And so, the squirrel saga has closed.  For now.

The only explanation is that my house is on an old Indian squirrel burial ground.