STORY TIME: A blizzard, squirrel and a pizza delivery
Winter Storm Harper put a damper on weekend plans for a lot of people but that wasn’t the case for my roommates, Logan and Joe, who proceeded to make the best of it.
Logan and Joe ordered a Domino’s Pizza during this snowstorm. Was it inconsiderate? Yes it was, but in Logan’s defense, he was hungry. But then the delivery guy’s car got stuck in our yard.
Guess who was dragged in to help the driver get out? Me.
We pushed, shoveled and brainstormed for an hour until we finally freed him.
Then Sunday morning came around. I woke up at 8:30 a.m. to a string of Snapchat notifications from Logan and Joe.
They were trekking home from the bars during the moderate blizzard, and on their way, Joe found a black squirrel in a pile of snow.
The squirrel — who was named Squirrel-lock Holmes by Logan — was freezing and had a bleeding nose. Logan couldn’t bear seeing the small creature freezing to death and scooped the squirrel into a brown paper bag and put the bag under his shirt to keep the squirrel warm.
They proceeded to bring it into the house and put Squirrel-lock Holmes into an empty brown box. They placed French fries and pizza rolls into the box for the squirrel, closed it and left Squirrel-lock Holmes to warm up under our staircase.
When I got out of bed and walked past the staircase, I saw that both the box and squirrel were gone.
Not. Good.
I marched up those stairs and walked into Joe and Logan’s room.
“Where is the squirrel,” I asked.
“It’s in the boiler room,” Joe groggily answered.
Joe, Logan, Andrew (another roommate), Taylor (Andrew’s girlfriend) and I were standing by the door to the boiler room, anxious and preparing ourselves to have the black-furred creature roam through our house in a feat of panic.
We had trash cans and a shovel ready, all entrances to the house open. But the handle to the boiler room wouldn’t budge. The door was locked.
Logan offered to pick the lock. After destroying one of my hangers and having Taylor walk home and back to grab Bobby pins, he managed to open the door.
Squirrel-lock Holmes was still in its box, but we still needed to get it out of the house.
“We can’t keep it?” Logan asked.
“Explain to the university why we have a pet squirrel in our house,” I said.
Logan went to the back door and put the box outside on our patio. Squirrel-lock Holmes left the box to play around the snow for a minute and then proceeded to leave our patio.
Not even two minutes later, he stumbled back shivering and wanted to come back into the warmth of our home.
Joe, Logan, Taylor and Andrew looked at me with sad eyes. As much as I didn’t want to give in – I refused to have a squirrel in my house – I caved.
Logan rescued Squirrel-lock Holmes and brought it back inside.
We gave him a couple of blankets (two old fraternity shirts that were warmed up in the dryer), water (out of a bowl) and food (two Ritz crackers).
Taylor and I frantically called our parents to figure out what to do with the squirrel. After an hour and a half of phone calls, Taylor was able to take the squirrel to a vet to get him looked at.
I didn’t anticipate my snow day to be this eventful. However, events like this tend to happen in threes. So that makes me wonder: what next?
Brandon Bounds is a reporter. Contact him at [email protected].