They're rats with fluffy tails.

So there I was, surfing the 'net when BAM! today's topic hit me. Squirrels! Seems that that fuzzy little beasts cause more power outages each year then lightening.

Here's the link: Suicide Squirrels

Here's my blog... an essay on why I hate squirrels.

Imagine, dear readers, a house of seventy-odd years. Character galore: hardwood floors and stained glass windows. A tiled fireplace. Professionally landscaped twenty years previous, meaning that what had been envisioned was well into fruition. Lovely, lovely, lovely.

And sitting next to said house, a tree. No doubt older then the house itself. The tree shades the front yard so completely that the living room and what became the nursery are comfortably cool all summer. The branches arch up, reaching to the sky and touching the clouds above. Each fall, it's an explosion of red and gold, so glorious that one almost doesn't mind raking.

And in said tree are squirrels. Furry little rotten bastards hell-bent on getting into my house. Brown rats with fluffy tails. One in particular, a ring-leader I'm convinced, knew how to slip in and curl up in my laundry basket. It's beady black eyes closed in repose as it enjoyed the warmth that's literally heaped on it, as shirts and pants and towels slide down to chute and land atop it's fat little carcass.

No doubt the dislike I possess comes from the moment I pulled a shirt from the basket and found him rolled up and ready to hibernate. No doubt his desire to torment me came from my ear-splitting, high-pitched scream of fright -- a scream apparently so harsh to his ears that he actually froze. Unmoving. Not even blinking, so terror-ridden was he. He gave nary a protest when the Big Guy came down and threw a rug over the basket, effectively trapping him inside.

Apparently, though, being ousted from my warm abode did not sit well with the creature.

There's something very disturbing about walking up to your front porch and looking up... to see three squirrels watching you and chirping. Rather macabre and Hitchcock-ish, if you will. I was waiting for the beasts to leap upon me much like one of Alfred's birds attacked Tippi a half-century ago.

Thankfully, they decided that menacing chatter was enough.

A little over a year later, they'd no doubt been waiting for the perfect opportunity, I was in the laundry room when I heard scritch-scratch, scritch-scratch. I thought it was my cat playing around the furnace. Perhaps she was chasing a bug.

Scritch-scratch. Scritch-scratch.

I was several months pregnant by this point and too tired to really investigate, so I just stood there and waited for her to come into view.

Scritch.

No. Not the cat. The squirrel. The glorified rodent. AND FRIEND. Playing about my furnace.

No screams this time, just good old-fashioned legwork. I tore up the steps and, in my least-ladylike vocabulary, told my husband and neighbor that we had, to put it politely this time, "guests."

Two of the four-footed overgrown vermin came back just weeks before we were to move. This time they dove down the chimney.

The joke was on them.

You see, the fireplace had been sealed. They landed underneath it where the ashes would have gathered. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. One apparently broke its neck (it wasn't in there long enough to starve), so we only had to deal with one live one. My brother grabbed him about his neck and literally threw him out of the garage.

Did you know that squirrels bounce?

(Disclaimer: no squirrels were harmed in the writing of this post.)