MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Had an italie sort of day today...

So I have (had) pigeons and other birds that I thought were roosting in vents and the soffits in the front of my house. After procrastinating for a long while, I finally had exterminators come out last week to deal with it. They got rid of birds and nests and buttoned everything up. That night, I can still hear movement in my walls and ceilings. The guys came back the next day, re-checked all of their work and can't find anything. Finally, they ask if they can take a look in the crawlspace above my condo. It turns out the birds were getting right inside the crawlspace, and the whole thing has basically been a pigeon coop for years. 10 or so birds stuck inside, nests, eggs, chicks, and about 3 inches of pigeon shit covering everything. They install one-way pipes to get the remaining birds out and they come back today to pull on hazmat suits and go up there to scrape up all of the mess.

So the guys show up and start setting up. One of them slips while he's up there and punches out a two foot section of my bathroom ceiling. They cleaned up the mess and taped up the hole, but in the meantime I've got plaster and pigeon shit raining down on my toothbrush and everything else in the bathroom. After about four hours, the guys come down and tell me they have to quit because it's now too hot in the attic to function, and they're only about 1/3 done with the job. My hope had been to wash my hands of this mess today, and now it looks like it'll be one or probably two more sessions, plus a plaster guy coming to fix the ceiling.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to work from home through all of this, and the babies (13 mos.) are just fit to be tied all day. I finish up work while my wife gives them dinner, then we all pile in the car to get ice cream and just get out of the house for a while. That goes OK, but when we get home, my wife suddenly realizes that nobody's seen the cat in hours and his dinner is untouched, which means he's either missing or dead. We start searching the house and find nothing. Our best guess at that point is that the cat snuck out while the exterminators were coming in and out. My wife starts freaking out, the babies start shrieking because it's now past their bedtime, and I'm yelling at everyone to calm down and shut up. Finally, I convince my wife to put the kids to bed, while I hit the streets and try to find him. I crisscross back and forth all over the neighborhood and turn up nothing. In the meantime, my wife's called her brother over to help search and she's blowing up the local Twittersphere. I come in to get a flashlight and continue the search now that it's dark. On a hunch, I make one more pass through the basement with the flashlight (I'd already been through there twice). Sure enough, there he is huddled behind the downstairs apartment's air handler, staring at me with big saucer eyes.

So in the end, everyone is safe and everything mostly worked out, but holy crap am I exhausted.