No, it's not the next Samuel Jackson vehicle.  It's my reality.  Deborah and I just moved into our newly purchased and rennovated house in Portland, Oregon a couple of weeks ago.  Some mornings we have been waking up to scratching sounds coming from somewhere...in the attic? in the wall?  At first I thought it was mice though it sounded bigger than a mouse (don't ask me how I can guess the critter's size by the sound).  I bought some mouse traps - the old-fashioned spring-loaded killers - and a rat trap just in case.  First I put a couple of traps in the crawl space under the house, but nothing has tripped them.  Then a put a trap in the attic which also went untouched.  For a couple of days I didn't hear anything and thought maybe whatever it was somehow got the hint or just coincidentally decided to move on.  But then I heard it again this morning.

When I told my sister-in-law about it she told me that friends of hers had a similar problem and it turned out to be a squirrel.  They knew it was a squirrel because one day they saw it in their house.  I had never heard of squirrels moving in like that and said "Nah!"  But after hearing it today and hearing it make a decidedly un-mouse-like sound - a sound that reminded me of the chattering noise that the gopher in Caddyshack makes - I reconsidered.  After being awakened by it this morning I was standing in my kitchen looking out the window and saw a squirrel sitting on the roof of my neighbor's house.  I watched him for a while, and then he turned to look at me.  Our eyes locked.  And then I knew...it was him (or her)!

Not sure how to proceed I decided to google "squirrel" and "attic", and I discovered that not only is it possible but from the number of hits I turned up it must be only slightly less common than having molecules of hydrogen in your attic.  Ah, the good ol' internets.  I learned more that there is more information than I could possibly want to know about how to handle a squirrel-in-the-attic situation, right down to the most popular trap model (the Havahart 1040 - as Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up) and the kind of peanut butter to use as bait (Skippy crunchy, duh).  But there was so much information that I became paralyzed.  Instead of learning a little bit and trying different things until hitting upon the right strategy, I learned way too much and shut down because I felt like such a squirrel-in-the-attic noob.

So the squirrel got a reprieve for the day.  But I'll regroup soon and take action...so watch out, squirrel!  I don't want to motherf***ing squirrels in my motherf***ing attic!