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Ever since my wife and I have been together, we've had animals in the house. Cats, dogs, parakeets, hamsters, etc. Those were the animals that we meant to have around. But then there were the unwelcome guests, the rats, the raccoons, possums, armadillos, snakes, frogs, squirrels, and wild birds. Welcome to Florida, the critter State. I'm jimpoling, and this is my view from the middle. We live in central Florida. If you live here, you already know what I'm about to tell you. If you don't and have designs on moving here, well here's a little bit of what you can expect. Besides tropical weather, beaches and theme parks. Cockroaches the size of volkswagens, lizards that cling deer screens, rats that camp out in urratic raccoons that take up residents wherever they want to, Snakes that swim in your pool, bears that roamage through your garbage cans, wild birds will fly around your living room, and even coyotes that can take out your pets. Welcome to the Sunshine State. Oh yeah, we've got sunshine two on a cloudy day. As the song goes My wife hates cockroaches with a white hot passion. I've learned to recognize the high pitched shriek associated with her encountering one of these guys. That usually means I need to get rid of the things so she can again inhabit the room in which it was discovered. Husbands everywhere, in case you don't know it, that's what we're good for, opening jars and killing cockroaches. In Florida, we have several varieties of these delightful creatures, but the most annoying of them all is the palmeto bug. This sucker is huge. You could put a saddle on its back and write it out of your kitchen. Well maybe not, but the first thing you do when you move into a Florida home is hire a good extermination service that will come out once a month and spray for critters. Really, no stigma attached to having a car with a big plastic bug glued to its roof sitting in your driveway. It means you're doing the responsible thing. You also learn the hard way that you can't keep things like pasta, cereal, flour, and sugar in their original cardboard store boxes in your pantry. You have to get those airtight, clear plastic containers and transfer the stuff into those containers before you can even think about putting it away. Otherwise you wind up with little black bugs in your cereal, flowers, spaghetti, et cetera, and you have to throw it out before you can even use it. Sure, you can have the exterminator spray the pantry, but that only staves them off for so long before you're back battling the little beasts again. So just get the airtight containers and call it a day. I had a friend of mine who lives in Michigan and had never been to Florida visit me once. He came into the living room from the patio and all the blood had drained out of his face. You're not going to believe this, he said, I just saw a lizard on your patio. Well, yeah, lizards are a common sight in Florida. I'm talking about these little lizards that are only a few inches long. They're actually the least offensive of the home invaders, and they actually serve a purpose. They eat bugs. They're harmless to humans, and unlike roaches and rats, I don't try to kill them when I see one, I may show it out the door if it's in a place where it shouldn't be, But they move quickly and are usually gone in the blink of an eye. If you have a pool in your yard, you're likely to get a snake in it once in a while. Usually Florida black snakes like to take an occasional dip in your pool or hot tub. Usually just fishing it out with a long handled pool net and flinging it out into the street takes care of them. They're not venomous, and other than giving you heart palpitations when you see one, they're pretty harmless if you steer clear. When the kids were little, we lived in a neighborhood close to their school. Unfortunately, though, like many neighborhoods in Central Florida, it was built back in the nineteen sixties on land that used to host citrus groves. That's what the main product of Central Florida was in those days. Citrus. Hey, we live in Orange count Before that it was called Mosquito County. Gives you an idea of what we're up against here. But when they plowed under the citrus trees and build the houses, the one thing left over from the groves were rats, citrus rats. I had an exterminator telling me that just about every house in that area had citrus rats in their attics or yards at one time or another. These things don't scare me. They make me mad. They may be mad even before I was the grumpy old get off my long geezer I am. Now. It was all my family could do to keep me from crawling up in the attic myself and getting rid of the buggers with my bare hands. Truth be known, I probably would have been too disgusted to actually do that, so instead I just set rat traps. They also screened every attic opening in the house that I could find. Then I'd sit in my living room with everything turned off so I could listen for the little devils chopping around in the attic, then snap as they get caught in a trap. One Christmas Eve, we came home from church and discovered that a rat, a fairly small but still disgusting, got into the house. It was on the ledge of the fireplace in the family room. Our two cats were eyeballing this thing. Now, when one of these rodents feels threatened, they let out a scream. Yeah, a scream. It's really creepy. The cats were essentially worthless in this whole thing. Standing there staring at this thing as it screamed at the top of its lungs. The cats were looking at us like, what do you expect us to do about it? No catting it for you two weeks. Squirrels can be another problem when they get in the attic. I've had neighbors complain about them. Someone told me that the squirrels are just rats with better pr We have possums and armadillos otherwise known as possums and riotgear roaming around the neighborhoods. We had a baby possum come in through a dog door once. That was fun. I came into my home office one morning and heard this tiny, little squeaking sound. I managed to relocate the little guy out in the backyard. Frogs like to hang out in my cantilever umbrella out on the patio. I'd open it up and they'd come jumping out at me. To watch me duck. As these stupid things come darting out at the underside of the umbrella, you're a splat when they land on the top of my grilling table. There's are our problem in some of the northern parts of central Florida. We haven't had anywhere we live, but we see them on the news every once in a while. But I like to get into trash cans and nose around patios. I mentioned that my wife and I have always had animals around. That was a change for me because I grew up without any pets at all. I was the second child, fourteen years apart from my sibling, and I wasn't around for the dog my parents had when my brother was growing up. But when I met my wife, she had a Lasha offso and a Siamese cat. The dog was fun. The cat, however, took extreme pleasure in seeking me out to throw up on me. For some reason, all you cat owners out there will recognize the guttural sounds of a cat getting ready to toss its cookies. It usually happens in the middle of the night. When these throat wrenching gyrations begin. We jump out of bed and try to grab the cat and get it to a place where it won't throw up on the carpet. More than once I was caught holding the cat straight out in front of me as it projectile vomited all over the place one night. We had just come home very late from one of the theme parks. It had to be about one in the morning or something like that. I'm laying in bed, my wife is taking a shower. Up on the bed with me is the Siamese cat. Now, Siamese are very loud me hours, you can hear them all over the place. Scaredy Cat, that was the feline's name, would start meowing loudly, interrupted by the familiar guttural throat sounds that met the content of her stomach was about to make an unexpected exit. I'm half asleep and I look and see Scaredy Cat marching toward me on the bed, meowing and making her throw up sounds. I knew she was going to lose it, and ground zero was me. Well, you can guess what happened next. I ran for cover, not that it didn't much good. Scaredy Cat was determined to make me the target of her regurgitation. I yelled for my wife and came running out of the bathroom. Of course, she thinks the whole thing is hysterical. I didn't see the humor in it. But the cleanup commenced, which included a complete change and sheets on the bed while I headed for the shower, I miss scaredy Cat. Does anyone buy that? But scaredy Cat was an intentional pet. It's the unwelcome, uninvited critters that really torqued me off about ten years ago. In the house we live in now, not the one I was talking about earlier that had the rat problem, I heard a noise in the attic. Now, naturally, given the history of the area, I assumed it was a rodent, so I called the critter exterminator. We actually have those in Florida. As a matter of fact, this company is aptly titled Doctor Critter. Now, the guy comes out to the house and goes up into the attic above my second story master bedroom. I can hear him rustling around up there and going uh huh. Then he comes down out of the attic and says, well, you have a raccoon. I asked, how do you know. He says, because I looked at him right in the eye. Told me that the animal will leave now that he has been discovered. That in fact happened, but that led to all kinds of horribleness, including a full chemical remediation of the attic and replacement of all the insulation. They said, it was like a poop bomb had gone off up there. Apparently that raccoon had been a freeloading tenant of mine for a while. Of course, all the openings by which a critter could gain entrance were sealed up. By the time all was said and done, it cost me and my Homeotors Insurance company upwards of ten thousand dollars to deal with the unwelcome guest. There's a reason why raccoons looked like they're wearing masks. They're highway rubbers. Now jump ahead about ten years. I'm building into my driveway and I look up on the roof of my house and what do I see but a raccoon. Oh brother, here we go again. So I immediately got out my garden hose and started blasting him, hoping it would discourage him from coming back. Well, that didn't work. Later that day, I heard a noise from up in the attic. Looking up at the roof in front of my house, I noticed that an attic vent been porn off, and two beady eyes were staring out through the opening at me. Yep, rocky raccoon was up in his room but I don't think Gideon's Bible had anything to do with it. So I called doctor Critter again. They came out and put a raccoon trap on the roof and positioned it in such a way that the animal had nowhere to go but into the trap. Sure Enough, a couple of hours later, I heard a loud bang. I ran out there, and there he was, behind bars in the raccoon trap on the roof. That whole process cost me seven hundred dollars. More recently, in our Critter adventures, a bird got into our living room. It apparently got in through the dog door. Now, how do you get a bird out of your house? I still have no idea, especially when the bird is in your living room that has a cathedral ceiling and a window way up high with sunlight blazing through it. The bird thought that somehow this sealed window was the way out and kept trying to exit the house that way. This was definitely a YouTube event watching my wife and I trying to rout this bird out of our front door. Me with a long painter's pole banging on the sill the sealed window, and my wife with a broom and a sheet. I don't know what she thought she was going to do with a broom and a sheet, But to be fair, I had no idea what I was going to do with a painter's pole. Neither one of us had any earthly idea what the heck we were doing. But she's waving the broom around. I'm banging the pole against the window sill and whistling, yes, whistling that to bring an idea. Huh. I figured maybe I would speak the bird's language. I don't know, someone called the autophon Society. Anyway. I think we wore the bird down, or maybe it was becoming too embarrassed to be around these two pole banging, broom wielding crazy people. But after about forty five minutes, it simply flew out the front door. Now I figured this was a one off event. After all, we've had that dog door for several years, and this was the first time that something like this had happened, So I figured the incident was behind us wrong bird breath. The next day, the same bird, I recognized it came in the same dog door and did the same thing as it did the day before. I guess it wasn't entertained enough by our actions. The previous day and decided to do an encore performance. I was by myself this time, so I just decided I would do everything I could to discourage the thing from going to the sealed window. So I just kept banging on the window sill with that painter's pole until it finally flew out the front door again. Then I took measures to block off the doors. This wouldn't happen again. Fool me once our latest uninvited guest in my attic was a squirrel. At least that's what doctor Critter, who I had to pay twenty six hundred dollars to get rid of it and sealed the house said. One evening, we heard scratching from behind the wall in our living room. Now, we hear noises like that all the time, and most of the time it's actually critters running across the roof, and it just sounds like they're behind the wall. But I have speakers for our surround sound system mounted in the living room, and there's a wire that protrudes from the wall that goes to one of those speakers. While we were listening to the scratching, if it was actually behind the wall or just another roof roadent. False alarm. I saw the wire move. Oh this meant there really was something behind the wall. Get out the check book. So there I am in the middle. Roaches in the kitchen, rats, raccoons and squirrels in the attic, birds in my living room. One would think we were living in wild Kingdom. No, it's just Florida, the critter state. I'm jimpoling and that's my view from the middle.