Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Holy Sink Surprise, Batman!

(This is the last post that still pertains to our Destin trip.  After a four-day technology conference last week, I managed to snag a wicked virus on my personal laptop.  I’ve since had it completely retooled by a professional, and I’m ready to get back on the blog train.  I’ve got a lot piled up, so brace yourself for an onslaught of end-of-summer posts.)

We had been in the minivan for fourteen hours (minus a few bathroom breaks, a fantastic brunch at Cracker Barrel, and a quick late afternoon nosh at Wendy’s).  Miraculously, the kids had been unbelievably well-behaved in their car seats.  They played their Leap Pads.  They colored.  They watched DVD’s.  They were—in a word—good. 

We needed that.  We really, really needed that.

Because there was something ominous waiting for us at home.  We could never have predicted it, nor prepared for it.  Our house had been waiting for us for a week now, ceiling fans motionless, air conditioner turned off, with the slight musky odor of an unlived-in building pervading the air. 

After fourteen hours on the road, we were exhausted.  Our dirty clothes were shoved into suitcases.  Sand littered the bottom of the van.  Our Florida tans had turned our skin slightly crinkly.  We wanted our own beds, a long sleep, and the chance to reclaim our normalcy. 

It was almost 9 PM when we finally pulled into the driveway.  Both kids were unbuckled and on the front porch before I could blink.  Yeah, they were ready to be home.  Once inside, they ran around happily while Erik carried in our stuff.  I wanted to take baths, but Hudson was starving and requested scrambled eggs and toast.  After a cursory glance at our fridge and pantry, I was amazed that we actually had eggs and bread. 

I instructed him to wash his hands in the bathroom, and I began to make a quick late supper.  Thank God my little man chose the left sink for his hand-washing, because the right-side sink held nothing but trouble for us, though we didn’t know it yet.

I made scrambled eggs and toast.  I sat with my son at the kitchen table and let the tranquility of home settle around me.  I chose not to remember the scuttling sounds I’d heard in our attic before departing for our trip.  We had assumed it was a nest of mice (though with all those annoying feral cats that our neighbors feed and encourage, it’s a wonder any mice could survive our neighborhood).  I just wanted to finish up this meal, complete baths, and go to bed.

Then I went into the bathroom.  I saw Hudson had left his hand towel strewn across the sink.  I went to pick it up.  I noticed a dark blur in the right-side sink.  I let my brain process that, and then I screamed. 

This is what I saw:
 
 

It wasn’t hanging upside-down.  No, it was curled in a ball in the middle of the drain.  It wasn’t moving, and I didn’t care if it was dead or alive.  It was a bat.  In my house.  In my sink.  I knew instantly that it had come from the attic, and that I had been hearing its little wings beat instead of baby mice those last few weeks.  I had hoped that by ignoring the problem it would go away, but instead it had ruined my homecoming from Destin.  Fabulous.

Erik took the news less well than I did.  He was ready to bolt from the house to the nearest hotel and pay for one more night away from home.  But once I settled down, I knew I wasn’t leaving yet.  This was my home, and I wanted to sleep here. Plus, I thought the bat was dead.  While Erik spouted statistics about rabies and shots, I got a couple of big spoons and a Ziploc bag.  How hard could it be to dispose of a dead bat?

It stank. Badly.  It had to be dead, right?  I secured my Ziploc bag inside an old plastic pitcher and held both spoons steadily in my hands.  I was moving in for a scoop-style method and felt pretty BA that I was handling this situation better than my husband.  Then I actually touched the thing, and it HISSED at me!

It was ALIVE!  In my sink!  In my house!

I flew from the bathroom, the spoons clattering to the floor behind me.  I slammed the door shut and informed my family that I wasn’t sure we should be sleeping in the house.  What if there were more upstairs?  After some speculation, we discussed our options and then called my parents.  It was nearly 10 PM by now, and we needed somewhere to crash. 

Still no baths.  Still in our fourteen-hour-traveling-clothes.  Still thankful my parents live less than five minutes away.
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So that really happened.  We had arrived home on a Saturday night, which meant that the next day was a Sunday, and it was impossible to get ahold of any reputable pest-control people.  Luckily, my dad knew a guy who ended up giving us quite the 411 on our little bat situation.  (1) Most pest control businesses won’t mess with bats.  (2) This guy had already been contacted by several of our neighbors, who had also had bat problems.  (3) Apparently a nearby church had similar bat problems and did a sweep of their bats, sending them out into our neighborhood to find alternative housing.  (4) My next-door-neighbor had recently purged nearly fifty bats from his chimney.  (5) In the end, my own father had to use a special tool to remove our single bat from our bathroom sink.  I’m not sure what he did with it afterwards, and I’m still not sure I want to know.

Here’s something you don’t realize when you have a bat in your house.  That bat itself isn’t really the problem.  It can be removed and forgotten rather easily, but it’s the lingering threat of additional bats that really wreaks havoc on the mind.  How many bats were actually in our attic?  Could there be more lurking away, just waiting to appear in our bedrooms in the middle of the night?  You’d be surprised how little we slept during the next week or so, waiting to hear those similar tell-tale signs of bat wings fluttering up in the attic.  We even went so far as to find the actual hole where our bat had escaped into our bedroom and then down into our bathroom.  How did we know?  There were tiny bat turds underneath the hole.  Eek!  So far, nothing new has surfaced, but I’m not sure I’ve had a full night’s rest since finding our sink surprise, and I’m not sure I’ll ever fully recover from the shock of it.    
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