But I still think POLAR BEARS are cute

OK, I give: Squirrels are not cute. They really ARE fluffy-tailed tree rats. I may even rethink the braking-for-squirrels-playing-chicken.

Here we are, two weeks to the day since a squirrel found its way down our chimney and ran around inside our basement ceiling (and much of the basement too, from what I can tell from the footprints and the knocked-over bottle of vodka, which means it was an alcoholic squirrel to boot), and there is no sign of Dead Squirrel Stench anywhere. This is of course good news; it means I don't have to pay a guy $1800 ($2200 if I want him to take down the old ceiling instead of doing it ourselves) to replace the basement ceiling to get a corpse out of there. But it does mean that either the wormhole in physical reality into which our late cat Wendy used to occasionally disappear really does exist, there's a Squirrel Transporter somewhere inside the ceiling, or somehow the motherfucker managed to find its way OUT again. But how? Climbing the chimney? If that's the case, why couldn't he have scooted back up again BEFORE I spent hundreds of dollars on a ripoff exterminator?

You know what's even worse? Mr. Brilliant swears he saw a very thin squirrel with a mangy-looking tail missing much of its fur (which is the kind of tail I saw on this thing when it was inside the fluorescent light fixture) in the backyard....yesterday.

Good thing the chimney's capped now.

I hate squirrels.