Sunday was--to put it mildly--very interesting around here. Actually, this story starts on Saturday, so here goes.
Early Saturday evening I went into the basement to start some laundry. When I got to the machines, I noticed that the dryer hose didn't look right. When I looked at it closer, I saw a hole in it--and it looked as if it was a CHEWED hole, not a break. I called K down to take a look-see-- and in preparation for a new hose, he turned the dryer on to dry out the old hose. Almost immediately a chipmunk came shooting out of the hole. As soon as we regained our composure--we both jumped about three feet in the air--we searched for the creature. At one point K got it trapped in the bathroom, but it escaped. We tried everything we could think of to catch the thing, but it wasn't happening. K then went to the store to get some of the 'sticky' traps. They were placed in the basement, we came back upstairs, closed the door, and tried to forget about it. I DIDN'T get the laundry done.
When K went in the basement on Sunday morning, he found two trapped and one loose. The loose one found its way upstairs and proceeded to the pantry. Thankfully K was able to catch it and get it out of the house before it got into any of the food. Later in the day, two more were trapped. We haven't seen any more, but we ran out of traps, sooooo....
We still are not sure how these things got into the basement. We thought we had that taken care of last summer, but I guess not. I think they, somehow, managed to get into the dryer vent and came in through the hose. Of course, once they were in, they had no way out except by chewing through the hose. I keep telling myself this is the explanation! We will have to put out some more traps just to see if we got all of them--I figure we will be safe if no more are caught in a 48 hour span. This just may be another long summer.
And I finally got the laundry done on Sunday.
