Nuts About Southwest

People that know me also know that bizarre things happen to me. Frequently. If I were followed 24/7 by a camera crew, I could have my own TV show. Think "America's Funniest Home Videos" with liberal dashes of "I Love Lucy" and "The Jerry Springer Show" thrown in for good measure.

For example, I blew up my pool filter a few years back by mixing algaecide and shock (when they say don't mix chemicals, they really mean it!), almost commiting self-immolation. My son, panicking, called 911, and every neighbor I have looked over the fence to watch the paramedics examine the burns on my arms. Another time, after construction began on a new subdivision behind my house, I stuck my hand into my kitchen pantry--only to have a little field mouse, ostensibly one that had moved in with me after its little den had been disturbed by the construction, ran up my arm. I did what any red-blood American male would do--screamed like a little girl and flailed my arm like a windmill in a hurricane. Unfortunately, that flung the mouse across the kitchen, and it landed on the head of my sleeping 160-lb. labrador retriever, who jumped up, freaked out, and in his gyrations trying to remove said mouse from his head he knocked at full velocity into the wall, where I put a large hole in the sheetrock.

So this morning...I got up, on schedule, and stumbled into my bathroom to do what everyone tends to do in their bathroom first thing in the morning. And there...in my toilet...was a squirrel. A DEAD squirrel. Floating placidly in the toilet bowl and staring up at me. I rubbed my eyes a few times to make sure I wasn't seeing things, and when the deceased animal didn't disappear, I figured it was real. So there I stood, speechless, wondering what the heck I should do about it.

After quickly looking around the bathroom to make sure there weren't any other squirrels coming to my waterlogged little visitor's funeral, I went into the kitchen and returned to the bathroom with the only utensil I could think of for the situation--the kitchen tongs. It should come as no surprise to anyone that the little critter was semi-stuck in the bowl, and it took a number of increasingly sharp tugs before it popped out. At that point, I realized I hadn't completely thought this through, as I had no clue how to dispose of a soaking wet, dripping, dead rodent. So, back into the toilet bowl went the squirrel for one more quick swim, while I went back to the kitchen and got a plastic WalMart bag. I sprinted back to the bathroom, extricated the squirrel one last time, and into the bag he went.

My trash gets picked up twice a week, and the next pickup isn't for a few days. So, until then, my furry little roommate is sleeping quietly in my freezer. Unless somebody can think of something else to do with him, anyway. Anyone got a good recipe for squirrel gumbo?