Life as we know it ...: Always SOMETHING . . .

We've known there was either an armadillo or a nutria (giant rat) living under the master bedroom closet (20 enclosed feet of the porch that goes all around the house). I go out to feed the horses on work days when it's still dark or almost dawn and I often see whatever-it-is heading under the house. I assumed it was an armadillo, but Mark has seen a giant nutria around the place occasionally, too, so it's possible that it's that, I guess. Nutria have really good teeth, that's for sure. Whichever it is is about a foot or so tall AND wide -- very fat!

I assumed it was an armadillo since our neighbor has "deleted" a number of them at his place
(no, I'm NOT going to shoot it - whatever it is)

This is about the right size for what I've seen.

But a nutria is very similar in size, it turns out!

And they have really REALLY effective teeth if one of those would want to get rid of that insulation!

But whatever it is, it has to GO!

When we had that closet added it was, of course, insulated under the floor and then there was heavy metal screening put across the beams to hold the insulation up. Seemed like a fine arrangement at the time. Ha!

I couldn't actually see all this, but I stuck the camera under the house and took a picture of whatever. When I looked at the photos, THEN I could see that the insulation protection sheet had been completely pulled off in most places!

And not only that, the insulation itself had not just been pulled down, but most had actually been shoved out of that area. In fact, that's why I was looking into it. All of the sudden when it got down to 40 degrees a few nights ago, I saw a LOT of the insulation out there on the ground when I went out to feed the horses.

I WAS going to ask Jerry to put metal fence material up around the bottom of the house to keep everything out from under there, but it turned out to be virtually impossible to do that in front where all those ferns and other plants are growing. (So now I need to take back all the stuff I bought for that. Sigh.)

I don't know exactly how the heck that critter is doing this. The insulation was fastened to the wood to keep it up there until the builder guy put that screening underneath to keep it up there so it shouldn't have been all that easy to pull down. Obviously it's taking a lot of effort to get it down (there's some below that's still attached to the floor -- but also being pulled down, obviously).

And at this point, more than half of that 20-foot X 8 foot area has been cleared completely! (And the floor in that closet is cold, cold, COLD when it's cold outside these days! Thank goodness that thing can't get into the walls, too!!)

Anyway, instead of putting up stuff to keep everything out from under the house, I ordered a trap that will come on Wednesday.

Jerry said once that critter gets trapped, I should just call him and he will come get him and haul him down the river and turn him out 15 miles or so away from here. Great! (Thanks, Jer!) I just hope he doesn't turn him out anywhere near another house on piers!

Jerry has been a huge help to us, I have to tell you. We first met him 10 years back when he was hired to help Mark when we were renovating the house before moving in. He's been helping off and on ever since! Yesterday Joey Hebert sent our 100 bales of hay for the winter over and Mark was offshore. But Jerry was here, thank goodness! He and the guy Joey sent over with the hay unloaded all that stuff in just 15 or 20 minutes! Amazing.

That gate on the left above used to be the only gate into that paddock where the hay storage building is. So it used to be necessary for them to just back up to the fence and throw the bales over and have another person inside there carry them over to the building because that gate is right next to the barn and there are a couple trees there in the way so it wasn't possible to drive a big truck and trailer in through there. But last month Mark and Jerry added a huge double gate toward the front of the paddock (see below) so that even a huge semi can back in there now. Yesterday, it was just a regular truck and a medium-sized trailer and he backed right up to the hay storage building and Jerry moved the hay off the trailer and the other guy piled it neatly inside the building! It worked GREAT! Guess we should have done that to begin with, but who knew! . . .

Okay, now I'm going to spend the next couple hours getting pictures ordered. I want to do a scrap book showing the house when we bought it and all the things we did before we moved in and over the past 10 years. Believe me, it's been a LOT! I love our house, but I really REALLY love it when I look at those pictures of how it used to look.

I also want to get pictures of Wendy and Mark and our critters to put in frames around the house. Right now, almost all of our pictures are stored in the computer (in an exterior hard drive, fortunately, so when the computers crash I still have them, thank goodness). Anyway, at this point, I think I'd like to have a bunch of them printed out. But it's going to take me a while to find the ones I want to send in. Check this out -- here is the listing of main folders:

Yep - they begin back in 1997, the year Mark and I got married. I do have pictures from before then, but they're stored under the general folders like Friends, Horses, Cats, etc. And then within each folder there are who-knows-how-many additional folders. Here are the 2012 folders, for instance: