Vermin and Porcelain

This past Monday, I experienced something that not many people have or ever will in their life.  It has to do with porcelain and vermin.

I woke up on that misty fall Monday morning, the way I usually wake up on misty fall Monday mornings--slow.  However, my shower didn't go the way they usually do.  Just as I stepped in, there was a hard and constant knocking on the bathroom door.  So, I shut the shower off and hollered "What the eff do you want?" ( not really, I was more polite).  It was my mother freaking out.  She told me to come upstairs quick and it sounded like she was crying.  So of course, being the great son that I am, I turned off the shower dried off and marched my tired ass upstairs.  Needless to say, it was a great morning so far.

When I got into our kitchen upstairs, my mother was pacing back and forth with her hand covering her face.  I was starting to get worried.

"What?"  I asked.
"Go look in our toilet" she replied.  At this point I was starting to think my dad left a gift more my mom in the bathroom before he left.  I was thinking, "I've never seen/smelled one that bad, mom."  It wasn't a number two.  It was a squirrel!  Alive!  Swimming in the toilet!  I shut the lid quickly and ran back into the kitchen in disbelief.

"How the hell did that get in there?"  I asked.
"I have no idea, do you think dad put it in there?"...yeah mom.  Dad wanted to screw with your mind so he trapped a squirrel, snuck it into the house and plopped it in the toilet all before he had to leave for work at 6 a.m.
"I don't think so mom."
"What do we do?"

I couldn't figure out how it would of got in there or how we should go about getting it out.  My mom was worried about getting it out alive, but I didn't see that happening.  All that kept running through my mind was the scene in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.  Except this would be worse, because this squirrel would be a wet squirrel.  So I ran and quickly hopped on the Google machine while my mom was trying to phone my dad every ten seconds.

This is what iLurrn'd

The toilet drains into a pipe which is a vertical pipe that goes through the roof.  You can usually see them from the outside.  They're little black pipes sticking out.  These pipes are big enough for a squirrel to fit into and in most cases there is some type of vent shield that protects the pipe from squirrels and anything else that can get on your roof.  We obviously didn't have one.

There's also a valve that usually prevents those critters and/or plants from getting in the pipe, but sometimes if it's small enough or positions its body right, it can get through.  Once through, it will most likely make its way through the largest exit pipe--the one that leads to the toilet.

Sadly, the little guy got tired of swimming and drowned, but we did give him a proper burial.  We also have put a Critter Quitter on our drainage pipe and will (hopefully) never have this problem again

But I'll leave you with two examples of how this could have turned out worse.