Fast, Cheap and Easy Tip #2 - How To Save Fifty Bucks

How To Save 50 Bucks

First of all: get yourself to one of the Harbor Freight places that have sprung up all over. There's one on Eisenhower Blvd.

Buy yourself one of their $20 live traps... it is a wire contraption that you will have to spend 5 minutes putting together if you don't stop to laugh yourself silly at the Engrish instructions and just put it together like a man... you know... like you know what you are doing...

STOP IT. Men have gotten VERY far with this technique. Y'all are just mad that we know about it...

Then buy yourself a house in the City. Then sit tight for a minute until a groundhog shows up and starts making your life miserable.

It won't take long.

Then put out the trap. Bait it with a bit of cucumber end or one of those tomatoes it so evidently covets from your ONE lone tomato plant you forced yourself to plant this Spring... the pig...

(it IS a hog, after all)...

and trap it.

THEN get the really big fat plastic bag that you have lying around that was too big to put anything else into... a couple of them if you have them... The ground hog is getting ready to pee and poop all over everything and this is your only defense.

Double or triple plastic bag the trap with the groundhog in it and put it in the back of your truck if you have one or can get someone who has a truck to do this for you. Otherwise the whole ball of wax and the groundhog must go into the trunk of your car and if you have a hatchback... well, yes, it will have to go in there... Oh, quit screeching about it. It's not going to be in there too long...

You're going to take it for a little ride, all right, but you're not going for a mafia hit, for crying out loud... just over to the City Island where they will not mind at all if you do not ask to free your groundhog...

Even if you do manage to strike up a conversation with the guy running the
Susquehanna kayak rental place he won't tell you not to. He does have a little doggie with him most summer weekends and I liked her immediately. She has an obvious intolerance for crapola. Black and white and some rat terrier in her, I'd say, and she LOVES groundhogs...

But despite what he says about being infrequently consulted on matters of relative moral turpitude... he told me to go over to the other side where the parking garage is now so his dogger wouldn't be too easily amused with it... so I did... and I cut off the plastic bags and opened up the trap after the hateful creature inside tried to bite me or make me think he would... he jumped out and ran for the river's edge and I wished Darwin well...

Darwin who I so named after the guy at the Susquehanna Rental place told me about the guy who invented City Island. It seems the place had to be repopulated with wildlife after they cleaned the Superfund waste site enough to sell it to Harrisburg as the premier sports and entertainment complex it is today. He had to bring rabbits and squirrels over in order to attract the hawks and so invent an ecosystem right there on the reverse New Zealand of Dauphin County... so, far from being wrong in loosing my Eleventh Ward groundhog there, I was actually participating in a rich tradition, he said...

I was just happy to have the ground hog gone from my back yard... and under my deck... and chewing on the underside of my sun room where I heard him gnawing away at the joists all damn summer without having to kill it.

And I was advised to kill it. I was advised to dose it with Coca-cola and antifreeze. I was advised to drop it, trap and all, off the Harvey Taylor Bridge like Billy Joe McAllister. I was advised to hit it with a Louisville slugger and to use a propane torch on it.

I mean.

I was even advised by an ex-82nd Airborne Paratrooper to pull its rodent head back and slit its throat in an effort to avoid the city ordinance against discharging a weapon.

I am not kidding about any of this and certainly not about the propane torch.

And as greatly as that furry rat on 'roids stunk up my car... and as poopy as he left this stupid trap that I'm about to hose off with bleach and whatever other non-biodegradable detergents I can find in this house... it made me happy to know I helped that stupid, destructive, tomato-eating creature...

I might have had more immediate sympathy for him if I had moved in on HIS territory out in the country... but he moved in on MINE... and I've gone to a lot of trouble to live in this ridiculous place!

But it's good to be good...

And Now For The Fifty Bucks Part:

This S&S is a very reputable service... there are many like it. Look up "Pest Control" in your local friendly yellow pages and you will find a whole raft of them. They will set a trap for you for about $35 and they will come and take the trapped creature away for another $35 or so. Now, if you didn't spend that $70 on having your little problem handled for you and instead bought that trap at Harbor Freight and spent your Saturday morning making your mind up to free Darwin at City Island instead of watching him die a horrible, double-plastic bagged death on your back porch... you will have saved... yes, it's all true,fifty bucks

So you will have to decide: What IS your time worth and what is the cost of a clear conscience? In my case: Priceless.