Oh brother, here we go again.

A long time ago (Co-op days), in another evil little town (Lynchburg, VA) I was house sitting for my boss. He left me an epileptic dog, some fish and a bird to watch. I was a tad worried about having troubles if anything should happen with the dog. I was instantly over this worry when I realized I couldn’t find the bird.

A strange little man in a strange house, suddenly I had become, Cursing Clay: Bird Hunter. Hours go by and I finally call my boss to let him know that I had managed to lose and/or kill a bird I had never even seen. At this point he decided to tell me his wife (a teacher) had left the bird at school as sort of a pet for her classroom.

Aw, isn’t that sweet? Sweet enough to pour over top of them and draw the attention of the thousands of ants that were later going to gnaw over they’re half buried bones if I had my way about it.

Of course this type of thing happens to everyone. Sometimes over and over. This time while I’m worried about watching 5 dogs that are more or less bigger than me and sometimes prone to fighting, I have more trouble with two gerbils than anything else.

Specifically, finding them. Rooting through the stuffings inside a habitrail maze not unlike one of those garden hedge mazes that sometimes turn into ‘Alive’ recreations, I can’t find the little freaks. Then I notice one of the lids has been popped off. Uh oh. Worse yet, this part is on top of a bookshelf about 6 feet tall. Getting a chair, I look behind the bookshelf fully expecting to see two little limp fuzzballs (potentially lying in their own pool of blood after all their little bones were smashed to bits from the fall).

Nothing. Hmm. Well, after awhile I heard some scuffling. This made me realize I’m more like my parents than I’d like to think. Because now I’m thinking one of them actually survived the fall, but is so crippled he’s scratching at the bookcase in a vane attempt to pull himself up and find food (much like someone being buried alive). Fortunately this was not the case – the little guy was simply scurrying around behind the bookcase.

I was able to clear some paths and finally saw one of them (light brown). The 3 bookcases lining the wall were all heavy, top heavy and awkward to move. At this point I couldn’t get him to come out and I still hadn’t heard from the other one. Trying to lure them out with food was not working. It’s about 10:30pm now and I still have 5 hyper dogs outside the room just waiting to get in and ‘help’ me find these little rodents. Ugh. Just in case they did come out from behind their hideout, I unplugged everything in the room (the last thing I wanted was crispy fried gerbils).

Already tired from basically not getting much sleep in the last 3 or 4 years and having gotten back from climbing (with a leg still sore from overdoing in at volleyball), I was really more looking forward to just going to bed. Instead, I went home and got the tool any serious man would get when faced with a manly challenge like saving a life – my hair dryer.

While you may be thinking it was I that fell off a 6 foot bookshelf and injured something, this was actually a good idea. Using the space between the walls and the cases, I was able to funnel airflow on the little buggers and drive them out. Now I see the black one. After patting myself on the back for such a genius move I realized two things: 1) I didn’t have a plan for actually catching them and 2) next time I should pat with the hand not holding the hair dryer.

But now the food and water lures were starting to work better. A good 15 minutes later I finally caught both of them and put them back in the cages. Which were now fully taped over so I don’t have to do this again. Now I can finally get some sleep.

Or can I? As it turns out all 5 dogs had the same genius idea, "wouldn’t it be nice to sleep on the bed?" Using my last bit of strength I was able to knock 3 of them off and crawl in. As they’re all so big, they just stood there leaning over the bed, panting in my face. I didn’t care, at least I had saved some gerbils.