Who Am I? I'm The Bat-Man!

The night before last, I was having a tough time falling asleep, resulting in lots of tossing and turning. After an hour or so of that, Vicki got up and left to sleep on the couch in the family (aka computer) room. Before long, now that I had the whole bed to myself, I dozed off.

Only to be awoken around 3:00 am when Vicki came into the bedroom, saying, "Bat! Bat! Bat!" There's not all that much that's funny about that, except that it's exactly what Tammy used to say, whenever one would get into the house and start flying around her bedroom upstairs. Not "There's a bat in the house!" or "I'm scared cuz there's a bat!".. just "Bat! Bat! Bat!" It must be genetic or something!

Over the nine years that we've lived in this house, I'd say we've had somewhere around a dozen or so bat events. Usually one of us will hear it flying around in the night, and then I have to go deal with it while Vicki, or Vicki and Tammy, cower under the bed covers. The first few times it happened, I carefully caught the little critter in a towel - always a challenge, especially if it's circling in a bigger room - and then released it outside. However, after one incident in which I did just that, we then we had a repeat performance the very next night, and I became convinced that it was the same damn one! I may've even said to that creature, "I'm pretty sure we've met before!" So then I started resorting to killing them. I don't like killing anything, not even spiders or bugs, but I'm also not crazy about setting them free only to have them come back.

Anyway, we'd thought that we'd finally solved the bat problem early last year (or possibly it was late the year before) when I sealed up a narrow crevice in our kitchen. The kitchen's an add-on to the house, as originally the house had a very small one and so previous owners tacked on an addition that made it about 6 to 8 feet wider. They chose to leave one small section of the original brickwork in place, showing where the house used to end (which I think is kind of cool). As a result, the double sink and the cupboards are all outside of the original house, and there's a space about an inch or two wide that they never filled in, between the brick and the start of the first cupboard. Vicki had suspected for awhile that we had had bats squeezing into the house through that access, after somehow getting past the siding on the outside. Once I finally listened to her theory (a year and a half or so ago), I immediately found cardboard and sealed up that crack, after which we suffered no more nocturnal visitations... until the night before last!

After dealing with the latest intruder, and eventually getting back to sleep, I woke up the next morning and for just a few seconds, I convinced myself it had all been a dream! After all, we solved that particular issue, right? There couldn't really have been a bat in the house last night, now could there? But sadly, it was no dream. So now we're back to trying to figure out how they're getting in.