This is how the squirrels look to my husband.

He took the day off from work yesterday to do battle with them. This was one of the three holes they put in our 1881 house (to left of Irish-decked out gargoyle and below drip-dried bat guano*):

The electric company came yesterday morning and unhooked the electrical wire, which the squirrels used as a bridge during their hostile takeover of our home. The squirrels moved in- at least a half a dozen of them, their cousins, and all their little squirrel suitcases packed with acorns and moonshine. The holes in the wood trim basically created a ‘Squirrel Habitrail’ for them inside the old invisible gutter system. So the kids, from their bedrooms, can hear then scratching and nesting and rolling their nuts around all night. We could see the pink insulation inside the holes, where they’d removed it from inside our walls to use for squirrel couches.

So BOB borrowed our neighbor’s ladder (because the holes are up high on the third story and we didn’t have one high enough) and, after the electric was turned off at the exact moment I was about to microwave my oatmeal, he spent half the day creating custom wood hole-fillers, painting them to match the trim. I asked him if he was sure there weren’t any squirrels trapped inside now, because the last thing we need is like dead squirrel smell. No, he said, they go out in the morning and come back in at sunset. (He’s been stalking them for months).

5:00 p.m. comes- I am on the front porch swing enjoying a More magazine and a Jack & Cranberry ginger ale; the kids are riding bikes, when I hear: “HERE THEY COME!” Our Middle Schooler runs to get my husband as we watch the first squirrel come across the ‘bridge’ (BOB actually considered asking the electric company to ‘strip the wire a little’ so he could watch them get fried coming across…). I suggest we place bets, and my money is on the squirrels to find a way back in to the house and their pink-sofa living room.

The next hour is spent with all of us running around the house craning our necks up, so that cars passing by probably think we have all lost our minds and are looking for the alien spaceship to land on our flat roof. At one point, the bloodcurdling SHRIEKKKK of our teenager can be heard in three counties as she (in her 3rd floor bedroom) is directly attacked- a squirrel was making a beeline for her open bedroom window. These muthefuckas are serious about getting back in. We hear scratching, but BOB’s fortress seems to be holding- for now.

Today? It’s Humans: 1, Squirrels: 0.

But by tomorrow? I’m guessing they’ll be driving us all nuts again.

*we do not complain about the bats because a.) I find it amusing that I have bats in my belfry and b.) they eat the mosquitoes around the pool.