Flying Squirrel Follies

I was sitting here in front of this computer earlier tonight and I though I heard some rusting and scratching. I wrote it off as the noises my son makes before he goes to bed since his bedroom is directly above my office.

A few seconds later I heard scurrying and caught a glimpse of something moving on the floor in my peripheral vision. It went around my desk and in a corner piled up with miscellaneous shit. The scurrying noise stopped. I stood up very slowly to get a look. At first I assumed it was a rat but when I saw it I noticed the wide tail. Then it jumped from the floor to the wall. I have a grass cloth wall covering in my office. It climbed right up the wall (as if it had done it many times before- it obviously knew it could get a grip on the wall) and then ran around the perimeter of the room, behind the filing cabinet (I hate papers and I need to get rid of that damn thing) and then to my window sill where it stopped.

It sat there on the window sill about five feet from me and just looked at me. Staring at it closely I noticed that it was a squirrel. I had an old folded shirt on the floor in front of the window so I stood up very slowly and slowly picked up the shirt while the squirrel just stood there looking at me. I threw the shirt on the squirrel and grabbed it up. I squealed a little bit but it was unhurt. I put it in a large bin made of see through plastic and took it upstairs to show the wife.

It didn't look the same as the squirrels we see around here in our yard by the thousands. It was grayish brown and had some stripes that ran from its front legs to its back legs along the sides of it's body. It wasn't much longer than 6 or 7 inches with its tail and it had large eyes. We assumed that it was just a juvenile gray squirrel with an eye problem.

Instead of killing it we decided to let it go. So I took it outside, put the bin on the brick wall surrounding our patio which is about four feet high. I opened the bin and jumped out and then glided about ten feet away before hitting the ground and running away.

At that point I realized that it was a flying squirrel. I didn't even know that we had flying squirrels in this part of the country but by Thor we do!

So now I want to know how that little bastard got in my house and then in my office!