I am a biological terrorist

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

That’s right. I have used chemical weapons and I’m damned proud of it. But also ashamed that I needed the internet to inspire me. Ashamed that when called upon for their assistance, my duly elected public officials offered me no meaningful recourse but to take matters into my own hands. I’m sure many of you have been wondering how long it would be before I finally snapped. You now have your answer. :mad:

But before passing judgment, let me tell you my side of the story while I still can. A few days ago I was the victim of a home invasion. I didn’t realize it at first. I hear things all of the time. I usually blame it on the cat. I know she fucks with me. Her ‘innocent kitty’ routine is the best I’ve ever seen, but it’s not fooling anyone - not me at least.

At first it was some faint, nondescript noises that seemed as if they could be coming from the attic. Not even noises really, but vaguely audible sounds any wood framed house might make in a strong breeze. That was easy enough to dismiss. Then one night, I heard a constant series of small pattering footsteps. It was as if some tiny, furry creature were playing both teams in some imaginary soccer match. From one end of the house to the other there would be a mad dash - patter - patter - patter - and then back. Again and again and again. Pretty soon I was just listening to see how long it could go on for. Eventually I got bored and went to watch tv.

At this point a few things were certain - the crime and the victim. What I now needed to know was the identity of the perp. That was going to be rough since there are quite a few gangs in my 'hood. The White Stripe Gang (skunks) are the most feared, but because of that, they don’t need to hide in attics. Plus, they can’t climb for shit, although if they ever hear you say that, I hope you’re prepared to leave town in a hurry.

I also eliminated the Shadow Gang (ground hogs) for a similar reason. They actually can climb but don’t really see the point. They’re not feared like the WS’s, but they’re fucking everywhere and you can’t spit without hitting one of their hideouts.

The most likely suspects were the Tweakers (squirrels). This was precisely their wheelhouse. The only problem here was that we’d done this dance before and I had taken precautions. There was only one way in - through the attic fan vent - and that had been covered with heavy gauge screening. So either they were in an alliance with one of the other gangs (unlikely), or there was a new player in town.

To be cont’d.

2

I’m going to like your side of the story. Maybe.

3

Waiting with bated breath!

4

Or possibly baited breath, depending on the entrapment scenario.

5

Where’s the rest of it? Did the Tweakers get you :eek:?

6

Not long ago, we thought an uninvited guest and taken up residence in our walls. Turned out it was just the ticking of a used clock that one of us had brought home.

7

Squirrels are a pest? They’re cute!

8

You’ve farted in their general direction?

9

Requisite acknowlegment of the Dept of Homeland Security flack who got assigned to this thread:

Hi! Welcome to the Dope (again)

I’m pretty sure the Dept sees this board pretty regularly. If this is your first time, now you can trade stories!

Hope you enjoy this break from your normal workload of analyzing your daily allotment of really *inspiring * deviant or illegal human activities bragged about on the interwebz.

10

It was touch and go for a while since I didn’t know who I was up against. But I HAD to find out. What made it worse was that access to my attic puts me at a tactical disadvantage. It’s basically a hole in the ceiling with a slab of sheet rock that the fits over the hole from inside the attic. To get in, you have to position a ladder in the hallway, climb up halfway, push the sheet rock up and out of the way such that it doesn’t fall back down on you and then try to peek inside to see what’s going on. If someone is there, it’s like playing whack-a-mole where you’re the mole.

Realizing that my intruder could be right by the hole when I decided to climb up and could easily take a swipe at me, I decide to use the blitzkrieg approach. I climbed almost all of the way up the ladder and was crouched under the sheet rock ready to push it up and burst into the attic. I did this while simultaneously letting out my most frightening battle cry.

As luck would have it, the intruder did happen to be right by the hole. I guess it heard me moving around and moved in to gather intelligence. So when I burst into the attic he (or she) was right fucking there in my face.

It was a raccoon. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve seen them around before, but I’d never thought of them in the same terms as the Shadows or Tweakers. To my mind it was like finding an al Qaeda cell composed of soccer moms.

We both retreated. However at that point I realized that a piece of sheet rock wasn’t going to cut it if Ms. Bandit decided to literally ‘drop in’ on me. Fortunately there happened to be a box containing an unassembled brass coffee table or something of that ilk right by the hole that was the right size to fit the hole and heavy enough to challenge my new “friend.” So I slid that over the top of the sheet rock and lower the whole precarious mess into place.

I also turned on the attic light in an attempt to make things a little less welcoming before retreating to consider my next move.

to be continued . . .

11

This sounds promising…

12

Banditos!!!

13

Clearly, I am going to need to learn to read slower, or you’re going to need to write faster!

14

OK, I guess I can give a little more detail now.

My first impulse was to call animal control. Their answer was to call an animal control service. Right. That’s what I’m doing. No, apparently not. I guess there are commercial services that do this sort of thing. I didn’t bother checking, but how the fuck does that work? I can only imagine that it’s a side job for desperate exterminators, right? And what are they going to do? Set a trap. Whoa, so-fist-i-cated. No way I could do that on my own. I mean it’s not like I couldn’t just go to fucking Lowe’s and buy a live-capture trap, bait it and put in the attic myself. Oh, wait . . .

So I asked what the procedure was if I managed to capture Ms. Bandito. The woman told me that it’s illegal to keep it in the trap for more than 24 hours so they would have to come out the same day but she said there was good chance that it was a female with babies.

THINK OF THE BABIES!!!

That’s why a professional would be a better idea. They would have a better idea of where to look to be sure that there were no stragglers or orphans. But this became like an ear worm.

THINK OF THE BABIES!!!

15

uh oh!

16

Until they chew through wires and/or die in the wall.

17

Ugh. That reminds me of when my friend in high school had a squirrel invasion in her attic and one died and fell behind the space in her kitchen wall. It took 3 mo for the smell of decay to completely leave her house. I refused to come over until it was gone.

18

THINK OF THE BABIES!!!

So. Imagine what this is like. Being raised Catholic I have a certain acquired immunity when it comes to guilt trips, but that seems to be pathogen specific. So I can fend off most guilt trips relating to people, especially if I happen to know them personally. Ha! You’d better be on fire with an extinguisher conveniently located if you think I’m going to do jack.

And while I might not have buckets of sympathy for Ms. Bandito, as cute as she might be, I was less sanguine about the slaughter of her whole family. At the same time though, letting her stay wasn’t an option. There have been too many rabies cases around here for one thing. But even aside from that, for all of their cuteness, they seem to be top vectors for a variety of diseases and parasites.

The thing was though, I couldn’t even calibrate my guilt meter since there was no way I was ever going to know if this was just some transient raccoon looking for a nice place to flop or a momma looking for a home. And I was never going to know.

First of all, I seriously doubt that anyone I had called in to handle the problem was really going to care all that much about looking for any raccoon kits – at least not in the sense of caring from a compassionate point of view. The main concern would be to avoid leaving anything behind that would end up decomposing that the home owner, moi, could bitch about.

Second, there is simply no way any kind of thorough search could be done up there. Only part of the attic has flooring, if you even want to call it ‘flooring’ considering the fact that most of it consists of planks that aren’t nailed down and will pop up if you step on them the wrong way. Beyond that, there’s stuff up there. Not a huge amount of stuff, but between not being able to stand upright, even at the apex and having to try to walk on the top of rafters for about 70% of the area, good luck poking around up there.

So finally, in desperation, I turned to the internet. I checked out a few sites and got the idea that it was completely feasible to convince Ms. Bandito that this was a shitty neighborhood and that she would never want to raise a child here, in which case she would leave on her own. I’m not sure how that works when you have a family but I’m guessing that’s what all of the noise was about several days earlier – that or she’d hired some raccoon moving company.

One of the suggestions was to soak tennis balls in ammonia and toss them around. This sounded like a good idea but didn’t seem like a long lasting solution. But it reminded me of something that might be. Years ago I used a garbage hauler that required me to leave my trash in bags at the curb. I have no idea what that was about, but it was a pain in the ass since animals could get into it at night and since these guys would come at no o’clock in the morning, put it out then wasn’t an option.

So I started using a product called [critter ridder](http://www.havahart.com/ourbrands/critter-ridder).  It’s a combination of different ground up peppers including black pepper and the kind that contains capsaicin.  It was remarkably effective; so much so that I’d bought a small case of it and still had several bottles.  I was able to find 3 of them.

I knew this wasn’t going to go over well with Ms. Bandito, but my hope was she wouldn’t realize what going on until well after I was finished. Since the stuff is ground, but not to a fine powder, the effect isn’t immediate. As a human, you can stick your nose in the bottle and you won’t be overwhelmed. However the fact of the matter was that I was going to be up there flinging *something *all over the place and that might be regarded as threatening.

So I put on my leather welding jacket and buttoned it up to the neck. Put on leather work gloves and ascended the ladder. After carefully opening the hatch and pushing it aside just enough to get my torso inside and give my throwing arm some room, I prepared the first salvo. The objective was to cover as much of the attic as I could from my vantage point with the 3 cans of ammo that I had. It’s about 30ft to the bi-level portion of the house, so that was going to be the toughest area to hit. But it was also the area I needed least to worry about since there was no crap stored there and so wasn’t a good hiding spot for a nest.

All of the other areas were well within reach. So I began, all the while constantly checking my sides and rear for any potential threats. I didn’t have free range of motion for throwing for a variety of reasons that were a bit different for each angle, but with 3 cans of critter ridder to work with, in the end, I’m not sure it mattered. I’m pretty sure I managed to saturation bomb the entire area.

to be cont’d.

19

This reminds me of a funny story. Years ago I went to an impromptu dinner party thrown by one of my friends. He had bought some expensive lamb and tried to cook it, but well, let’s just say he’s no chef. Anyway, he does have a very good taste in wine so we start getting into that a little too heavily, and because the adults are getting slightly drunk, he sends his five year old daughter to bed.

About an hour passes and she comes back downstairs saying, “Daddy, I’m scared. There’s a monster under my bed”. Now, nobody believes that, of course, but the kid is insistent. “Daddy, there’s a monster under my bed!”. So he does the dad thing and takes here up there to show her that there is no monster under her bed - under bed monsters don’t exist. He crouches down… lifts the bed skirt…

It was a racoon!

Our half drunk asses had a hell of a time getting the thing out of the house. We ended up building kind of a track run out of furniture and some poster board, with way too much trial and error, and shooing the little guy out the front door. Well, I say “little”, but the thing probably weighed about thirty pounds.

Anyway, I don’t suppose I have much of a point to this story. It’s only peripherally related to the OP. But, well, take it from me: the next time a kid tells you there’s a monster under the bed, there just might hilariously be one.

20

This is a brilliant advertising campaign. Well done.