Wonky Chipmunks That Speak English

It's after three in the morning. I am so exhausted that I'm not even tired anymore. It's very annoying. I have two awesome, long posts coming up for you all to explain my absence. But right now I'm going to make a short post, because I'm pretty sure I just entered the Twilight Zone and need to document it.

I had a busy day today. I came home exhausted. I was ready to turn in around midnight, which is extremely rare for me. All was going well until the cats started to throw a conundrum that I could not sleep through. We have a crap load of stink bugs in our area and they often get in the house. This results in the cats chasing them around like nobody's business. Therefore, I figured this was all they were doing. Normally they catch it fairly quickly and life goes on. Only this time they weren't seeming to get it and the gosh darn things were keeping me awake.

I got up to get a drink and the vacuum to see if I could just end their fun and sweep up the little sucker. No pun intended. I really, really needed to sleep. As soon as I entered the kitchen, one of the cats threw a serious fit and the next thing I know it a little chipmunk goes flying past me. Yep, a chipmunk. In my house. After midnight. When I was trying to sleep. As you can imagine, this just made me all kinds of gleeful.

Now, I'm not particularly fond of things that run really quickly across the floor. I'm always afraid they'll run over my feet and cause me to scream. I know. I'm such a girl. I mean, I can deal with the dead, but little, furry things that run...forget it. Lots of people have irrational fears, I know, but seriously self? Woman up. Put your big girl panties on and catch that sucker. Which is exactly what I intended on doing.

For the first hour, yes, I said hour, I tried trapping the thing under a bucket in hopes of sliding something under it and taking it outside like that. I did everything you could think of. A few times I even had it cornered, but it managed to get away. Please keep in mind that this is on top of trying to keep the cats from getting it. I would catch the cats as I could and throw them out on the screened in porch, but some of them were running just as fast as the chipmunk, making them extremely hard to catch. And man, those freaking things are fast. After an hour of trying everything possible, I still hadn't caught it.

The second step was to take up texting my mom, who was staying with a little old lady for the night, and ask her what to do, because I was tired and had it with this bugger. She suggested chasing it outside. I realized in about two point four seconds that this wasn't going to work. The thing didn't want to come out in the open long enough, and when it did, I was too busy chasing the cats so they didn't eat it, and trying to collect them, to chase it outside.

The third third step was just to basically cry, swear, and get really upset because I was so tired. Then I wished I could just go to sleep and let it run around. But alas, I could not.

The fourth step was to go and get a cat cage out of the garage and try to trap it in there. The reason I didn't do this in the first place is because our garage is down a little hill and not attached to our house. We live in the country, and where the garage is situated, if anyone would want to kidnap me, they could without anyone seeing. Plus, it was super pitched dark out and I just wasn't comfortable doing this at the wee hours in the morning. Mostly, my fears were just irrational and nothing bad was going to happen, but every time I see the news and hear of someone going out and getting hurt at two am wandering around their yard and neighborhood alone, I wonder what the hell they were doing outside at two am if they weren't out with friends, at a club, etc. I just didn't want the headline to read "Girl Dies Tripping Over Feet In Own Yard At 2am." My fear wasn't that anything was going to happen, it was of the headline if a one in a million freak accident did.

I brought the cage up without incident. I think in my case there was actually a one in a million chance of me not having an incident. I seem to do the opposite of everyone else. By this time the little bugger had ran into the back bedroom and I had stuck towels under the bedroom to trap it in there so I at least didn't have it running everywhere and had a chance to catch it. I brought the cage into the room, put the towels back under the door, and prepared to catch this thing. But no matter what I did I couldn't get it. It even hid behind a few things and I would corner it with the thing it was hiding behind, leaving it only the cage to run into, and it would still find a way to crawl up something and jump over it. I tried just setting the cage there and hoping for the best. I tried chasing it into the cage with a broom. I failed at all of these things.

Finally, seeing as I was defeated and completely beyond exhausted, I set the cage down and decided to do the only reasonable thing; cry while having a conversation with the chipmunk who was hiding and that I couldn't see. It went something like this:

"Little chipmunk, I am just trying to help you out. I promise that I not going to hurt you, but you have to trust me. I just want to get you into the cage so I can take you outside and get you far, far away from any kitties. You don't want to be in here, darling. Please just let me take you outside where there's no kitties and set you free. All I need is for you to get into the cage. I promise I'm just trying to help, but you've got to trust me."

I must have gone on like this for a good five minutes. I eventually stopped, realizing I was just going to have to go to sleep with the chipmunk in the house, if I could get to sleep. Most likely I'd lay here and keep being woken up by the cats, hoping no one killed it. It was too cold to leave the cats on the porch all night. Then, not thirty seconds after I had stopped talking the dang thing walked right over to the cage and went right in. I shit you not. Let me repeat that for emphasis.

THE DANG THING WALKED RIGHT OVER TO THE CAGE AND WENT RIGHT IN.

As promised, I swooped up the cage, took it outside, and let it go where nothing would hurt it. If I had known all I had to do was give it a pep talk while crying, I would have done it two hours ago and had this whole thing over with.