We don't want to know what's really going on
I have lessons to impart to my dear readers today.

This one time, I was typing away on a computer Phil used to have (but I had taken it as my own, ha!) and I look down between the keys on the keyboard and I see these two thin, white things jutting up between, say, H and N. I peer closer and realize there's a spider, about the size of a freaking quarter, in my keyboard, under my fingers, ready to scuttle and pounce at me any second. Naturally, I go apeshit and start pounding the keys and jamming sharp objects between the innocent letters. The moral of the story? Clean your keyboards every now and then, kids.

Here's a memory of mine that remains vivid as ever. Back when Phil and I lived at the Villager, in the springtime, when the sun was leaking through the mini-blinds like melting butter, we awoke to the sound of digging on our roof. It was annoying. Figuring it was bored squirrels just passing the time, we pounded on the walls as if to tell them to get their jollies elsewhere. They would stop for a while, but commence digging as soon as we had drifted back into slumber. This same thing went on for a week or so. The would dig, right above our bed, and we would shout and jump on the bed and pound the wall with vigor. It was hell. But it got worse.

We came home one day and beside the bed was a clump of sheet rock dust that had fallen from the ceiling. Curious, but not alarming. Then one morning, the digging began, and we looked up and saw a tiny hole forming in our ceiling. And the hole got bigger, big enough that we could see beady squirrels' eyes through it. And the squirrels, having finally made it through the insulation and plaster and whatever else it takes to make a ceiling, scratched at the sheetrock like demons, trying to widen the hole so they could come through and attack us, like they had apparently been planning to do the whole time. We jumped out of bed and grabbed a wire coat hanger and some aerosol air freshener. Phil sprayed the vile beasts with canned Hawaiian Breeze and I prodded at them with the straightened coat hanger, and we heard their faint squeals of terror as they retreated.

Horrified at the sight of our dear, dear ceiling with a hole now the size of a golf ball, we covered it with duct tape and called the landlord, who said she couldn't get anybody to us until Monday. So we guarded the taped hole. But the squirrels laughed at our pitiful attempt at defeat. So they started digging to the right of their other hole. The made it through just a bit when we covered the second hole up and prayed for the maintenance man to hurry. Finally, the maintenance man (who thought Gonzo was a possum) fixed the hole on the outside and patched up our ceiling. He said the squirrels had shimmied their way up the meter pole outside, and gone inside a small hole in the awning that birds probably used to nest in. Inside the awning, it only took a week of morning digging to get inside to the tasty humans and ferrets.

The moral? Always, always always have air freshener and coat hangers on you.