OOOOOOkay

Yet another wild kingdom episode in the Johnson household tonight...
Monday they started to put a new roof on our house, and tore off all the shingles. Tuesday they ran out of new ones, so they finished up Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday night we began hearing noises in the exhaust vent over the stove. We called the Chief, because he's the handy go to guy, and he said it was probably just the flap on top loose and blowing in the wind. All day Thursday we kept hearing noises and it didn't sound like a flap on top of the house noise. It sounded like something sitting right on top of the hood in our kitchen. Thursday night Caleb climbed onto the roof and, lo and behold, no loose flap. So we're thinking if a bird has flown into this vent it's been in there at least a couple days now and is probably getting close to death. So tonight after another whole day of scratching and flapping noises, Caleb pries open the exhaust tube and peeks inside only to find himself eye to eye with a giant mouse.
For the time being, he closed back the tube and we prepared the kitchen for battle. Towels under all the doors, gloves on our hands, and tried to get Sasquatch to pay attention. When everything was ready we opened up the tube again and waited. The first attempt the mouse made to climb out Caleb tried to grab it, but it freaked out and fell back to the bottom. We then got a stick and put that into the tube... sort of a ramp apparatus for the mouse. This time it made a run for it with gusto. It jumped out of the tube, bounced off the coutertop and then hit the floor where Sasquatch quickly took interest. It got hurt bouncing off all the hard surfaces from such a great height, so it wasn't really running. This gave Squatch the chance to play with it in the kitchen. Then we had to try and keep Squatch back, get the mouse in a towel, and throw it out the back door.
One of these days I'm going to get the video camera for one of these episodes. We get all jumpy and scream and yell and I'm sure it's hilarious to watch. When we finally got the mouse outside, my heart was beating like crazy.
Here the story goes from slightly entertaining to kind of sad. The mouse was injured and Sasquatch just kept playing with it. So Caleb went to the garage and emerged with a big stick. I stayed inside for the rest of the story, but there was yet another mouse casualty in the Johnson house making the score Johnsons 2 - Mice 0.