great panic

“JUSTIN, COME HERE RIGHT NOW! COME HERE RIGHT NOW! I NEED YOU HERE NOW!”

These are the sounds of a desperate woman in serious trouble; a woman whose home is being invaded by mutant, blood-sucking aliens, or who just cut her hand off in a blender and is picking her fingers off the floor one at a time, or who has been out of toilet paper for 46 minutes while I was trying to figure out what the horrible screeching sound interrupting my Mario Kart Wii game was. As it just so happens, they are also the sounds of a woman who sees a gopher.

We got a new pet. His name is Gill and he’s a gopher. He’s not a pet that we want and is apparently waterproof (after shoving a hose down his hole for approximately infinity minutes, he’s still alive). Gill has actually been around for awhile. The plants in our front garden started mysteriously disappearing over a month ago. Really, the whole thing was sort of creepy. It was as though we were living in some sort of time warp: one day a pretty little flower would be blooming in the sunshine, the next it would be gone without a trace. Like cookies or celery when Ian and Christen are around.

We thought it was the neighbor’s dog. Melissa even wanted me to set up the camera to time-lapse videotape so we could catch it in the act. Good thing I put that off for as long as I did. Finding out it was really a gopher saved me a lot of work. Actually, it just saved me the work of setting up the camera. I still have to get rid of the gopher. Maybe this means I’ll post again before December just to keep you posted on Gill’s status. Maybe.