in my bathroom. Either it’s the amplified ghost of last night’s dead mouse, or a rat or a squirrel or a giant anaconda, but it’s huge. Two nights of fifty degree temperatures and suddenly my house has turned in to the last outpost in the Arctic.

I was sitting at my desk tonight and kept hearing scrobbling noises above my head in the master bathroom. I thought it was Grita, my cat, after a bug or maybe another mouse, but it just kept going. So I went upstairs and the bathroom door was shut, as it usually is, and Grita ran up the stairs from where she had been all this time in the living room. Knowing that whatever was making those noises wasn’t my cat, my heart sunk and I opened the bathroom door. SOMETHING was behind the curtains that cover the unfinished cubbies under the eaves, which are awaiting some custom-built doors. So “Psycho,” I know!

I steeled myself and removed the curtains. SOMETHING ran from one cubby to the next, through the wall, flopping around on top of the plastic that lines the cubbies. It sounded almost like a bird, flappy and panicked. I was waiting for it to burst out and claw off my face, but it got quiet, and then nothing.

So just what I need. Another, even bigger, unidentified creature in the only space that directly connects to the area of the house in which I am most likely to pad, barefoot and sightless in the night, to drop trou.

I am so over the creatures in the cubby holes.

I set two mouse traps, discovering that either last night’s mouse or this unidentified monster had eaten most of the vinyl off a bath pillow I had stashed in the cubbies. Vinyl for dinner? I mean, really? I am not sure mouse traps are heavy enough artillery for whatever’s in there now, and I totally expect to wake up to a furious raccoon, a snapped mousetrap dangling from its toe, flying at my face when I open the bathroom door. Of course, the racoon will have rabies and will maul me to death in my own home. If I don’t post in the next few days, call an ambulance, no need for the siren.

Nature always wins.

Until I figure this out, I am avoiding the upstairs bathroom during the night. Which probably means I will break my neck navigating the stairs in the dark, but at least I won’t die of rabies.