STEP UP TO THE BAT

Usually I don’t have much of interest to say after I come home from a vacation. So the blog goes away for awhile. Not this time.

Homecoming so far has been pretty entertaining, at least if you don’t live in our house.

While I was gone, John said a bat hit him in the face while he was asleep, and he woke up swatting it. Then he got up and searched for it, finally found it on the floor by the head of the bed, hit it and stunned it and sucked it up with the vacuum cleaner. Then he apparently (at about 2 a.m.) vacuumed up everything in the room, including the closets, stuck a sock in the opening of the vacuum cleaner and went to bed. The next morning it was still in the cleaner bag alive and he killed it and threw it in the trash.

When he told me this story, I wondered if it was really a bat, because we have some giant moths, and he has the same reaction to moths, especially when anything wakes him out of a sleep, he wakes up fighting.   

That’s what I thought until last night. I was putting away stuff from my trip and walked into the back sunporch -- the one that Richard has taken all the walls off in preparation for the window job that he apparently plans to do before he dies, but not necessarily before I die -- and there was a bat on the floor. I closed the door and left and went to get John, who of course is somewhere else in the house and can’t hear me yelling hysterically. We went back up there, and of course couldn’t find it. Then we had Tim and Lynda come over, and still couldn’t find anything.
So we sat down to watch Fringe. And then, there was a bat flying around the living room. John’s reaction was to go get the broom and start flailing it around (remember, our living room is practically a glass museum, with the added attraction of other tippy fragile things, like harps. ) I hear the broom crash down on the harpsichord and say "Remember, there’s more than the bat in here." The bat of course is flying around crazily because everything in the room is in motion.
Of course, it’s a little difficult for him to hear exactly what I’m saying, because I have a blanket over my head. I think in an emergency it’s important to do what you are best at, which in my case is run and hide. But finally I took the blanket off my head and decided to go hold the front door open, so that if he does shoo it out, it will have a way to leave. And the bonus is that I get to get between the screen door and the wall, relatively shielded from marauding bats. But in fact, while I’m standing there, I think that I see the bat fly out.
Again, I call Tim and Lynda, but while I’m on the phone, I think I see the bat flying down the stairway. Now I’m unsure whether there are two bats or when I thought I saw the bat fly across the porch he was really still in the house but on the other side of the glass. Lynda came over and brought her fishing net so we could try catching it if we saw it again, but of course they don’t show up when anyone else is here.  

So here is the troupe: man with broom, woman with fish net, woman with blankie over her head. The intrepid crew stalks around the house, searching for prey, but finds nothing. Is there one bat? Two? Three? How many are still in the house? I don’t know. I’m not getting too far from my blankie, though.

Up until this time, I’ve been falling asleep, because I’m still jetlagged, even though it’s only 10 p.m. But now I’m afraid to go to bed. So we’re going all around the house putting towels under all the doors, because most of our doors have plenty of space for a little bat to crawl under it. We think we created a safe zone in the bedroom, and since none attacked during the night, that seems to have worked.
It’s now morning, and I want to call some pest control people. But the phone book is in a closet that has an open area above it that we thought last night might be an area where the bats are living. I finally swallow my fear and open the door, fully expecting to be assaulted by a swarm of bats, but that doesn’t happen, thank god. 

My calls to pest control people, because, it’s, you know, Saturday, aren’t exactly what I was hoping for. (Picture a knight on a white horse or a guy in a hazmat suit for what I’ve been hoping for.) But guess what? They won’t come out and search and destroy the bats. One company will give a free inspection and estimate, the other wants a good amount of money but gives me a lot more information.
It seems you have to find where they’re coming in, block that off, and create an exit. I’m thinking of all the places they could be in the house, and the fact that there are so many doors and I ask the guy if they put up little tiny exit signs for them to go out. He claims that they can always find it. 

And then he says the dreaded words, "If you’ve seen one bat, and especially if you’ve seen two, I can guarantee you there are more." Well, isn’t that just what I wanted to hear.
At the end of our conversation, as we’re making an appointment for TUESDAY!!! he tells me about their other services for eliminating bugs, and I tell him I don’t really need those, because I have the bats for that.

So now we have to wait three days for a technician to come out. In the meantime, John is combing the house for chinks in the armor, of which there are MANY as it turns out. I’m also a little concerned about the fact that while we were looking for the bats last night, I saw about 5 dead wasps on the windowsill in the sunporch, and they weren’t there when I left. We’ve had a wasp problem in that area before, but that was about 20 years ago and there hasn’t been anything since then. But then, we used to have a wall there, too, instead of just the studs and the outside wall.
We think we’ve created a bat-free zone in the bedroom, and are leaving the doors closed and only accessing it through the bathroom, which is now a sort of a vapor lock. I slept with the sheet over my head all night.