Today's wild animal spotlight is the woodchuck

Anna found a woodchuck outside our patio door this afternoon, and it didn't want to be shooed away with a broom. Bad choice by Mr. Woodchuck. Our neighbor came and killed it for us with a baseball bat, and then he disposed of it too. Full service extermination for free. Thank you, wonderful neighbors! I can handle weasels with a baseball bat, but woodchucks are a little too big for me. Well, maybe I'll try the next one. I have to upgrade from weasels at some point, right? Poor Mark. It seems like everytime we have run-ins with wild animals he's not here. We've had a weasel, bats, and now a woodchuck in the past month. He did get the skunk though. Mark came home Wed night from Alaska and had to leave again Friday afternoon for his reserve weekend in the Cities. He's been home for about one week out of the past month.

So the bat situation just gets worse

Sometimes you get kicked when you are down. It's not right, but I guess it's life. I called all around the town, the county, and then the next county to find someone to help me with my bat problem. Well, this fine gentlemen tells me that I live too far away and he doesn't want to drive 75 minutes to service us. Great. Then I call a place in Watertown, SD (which is closer). They refer me to a company out of the cities who also doesn't service this far out. However, in the process of talking to this company, the scare the crap out of me about the bats. According to them I was supposed to leave the house immediately when I saw the bats and leave the bats inside. Then, I was supposed to have someone come remove the bats and have them tested for rabies. Since I let them out of the house we should all go get rabies tests. Geez. Not what I need to hear, ya know? So, anyway, I finally found someone out of Marshall, MN who is willing to make the drive to our place. His price is....$625. Yikes. That's a lot of money for us. What can we do? We can't have bats in the house, and we can't find anyone else to come this far out. I feel like I've been kicked. Life will resume as usual, but I need a moment to recover.