Phantom Driller

The other night, I swear I heard someone ring our doorbell around 1:30 a.m. I got up to check it out and found a car idling in front of our house. It drove off and I went back to sleep, but naturally, now I've got the creeps.

Of course, Joe doesn't get up because when he sleeps, it's like he's in a coma and he claims he didn't hear the doorbell. And neither did Em. But Col did--and now we both have the creeps.

Anywho, fast forward to a few days later after the Creepy Idler incident. Joe and I are outside watering the garden. As we are dragging the hose to the far side of the house, Joe spies some sawdust on the sidewalk next to the house.

"Hmmmm. What's with the sawdust?" he asks and keeps moving. (That's what Joe does--he points it out so that I take care of it. He's nice like that.) And so I start freaking out because I thought it was termites or something.

But then I look up and see this:

It's my snappy "Wipe Your Paws" sign with a hole drilled through the bottom of it.  Eek!

So while I figured out where the sawdust came from, I REALLY started freaking because apparently that mysterious doorbell-ringin'-car-idler creep was drilling holes into my sign by the side door!  Sheesh. The nerve. 

But then I started thinking that didn't really make sense. I mean, why would he bother to ring the bell if he was just gonna trash my sign.  So I took it down to investigate and I saw that the little hole didn't really go through the sign--it just kinda went on an angle upwards into the wood.  Hmmmm.....

And after I stuck a stick in there about 7 inches, Joe decided that this was something he needed to get involved in.

"Look's like a bug hole..." he says.  Yeah,  no kidding Sherlock. (But I said some other stuff that wasn't so nice because this was my cute sign, you know?)

And then he proceeded to blast water from the hose into the hole to see if something would come out.  Yeah, while I was holding it.  Great idea, Joe.  Now some evil spawn was gonna crawl out and kill ME!

But I wised up and put it on the lawn so I didn't get killed or anything.  And the entire family gathered 'round while the evil spawn clawed it way out of the hole sputterin':

Bee!

I had no idea that bees drilled holes in wood like this. Sheesh. It scared the crud out of all of us!  And boy, did he look MAD! Well, and a bit drowned too. 

I'm still trying to figure out how he rang the bell and drove off in that car...