When Animals Attack!

I'm laying in my hammock, minding my own business (actually I was singing along to Grease on my computer, which some might have found annoying, but that's besides the point), when all of a sudden the very timid, polite Elizabeth is waving frantically for my attention. I take off my headphones and she proceeds to tell me that there is a wild animal lose in her room and she needs me to save her. Those weren't her exact words, but that was the basic premise of it. She says that she was laying in her bed when she heard a sound coming from her roommates Cecile's bed. She looked over and saw something moving inside Cecile's purse which is sitting on her covers.

I walk into the room pretty confident of what I'm about to find. Obviously a mouse has run into her purse and is eating something in there. I try to figure out my best approach for getting the purse closed and out of the room without having the mouse jump out at me (which naturally would make me scream and run away and TOTALLY kill the macho man image I'm sure Eliza has of me. I should probably mention that Eliza is super awesome and impressing her is somewhat important to me). I don't see any movement from the bag, but I swoop it up as quick as I can and bring it out to the front porch. I carefully peek inside but I don't see anything. I slowly dump the bag onto the ground, but aside for normal-purse things, there's nothing inside. I go back to the bedroom and look through all the covers (praying that I won't actually touch anything with my hand as I reach through them). Nothing's there. We figure whatever it was ran away somewhere and I go back to my Grease Lightning.

Two minutes later, Eliza is waving for my attention again. She tells me its back, and this time she could see that there was something actually inside the lining of the purse. I bring it back outside, dump it out again, and sure enough, you could see a little mountain moving around inside the lining of the purse. I look around for a hole but can't find one right away, then Cecile (who returned in time to see us dumping her purse all over the floor) tell us that there's a hole inside one of the pockets that leads into the lining. The unfortunate thing about this hole is that it's very small, just large enough for me to wiggle my finger through. That means in order to remove this animal, the only thing I can to is stick my finger through the hole and pull it out.

Man, did that take a lot of will power. I could feel through the lining that this wasn't a mouse, it was something hard, definitely some kind of bug. I figured scooping it out wasn't going to result in me being bitten (not in a mouse-sort of way, at least) so I went for it. Let me tell you something, it's really friggen horrible to touch something big, hard and squirmy when you can't see what it is. I had to try several times before I could finally get it out of the pocket, and by that time I thought I had it figured out what it was. A few months ago we had a horrible infestation of Japanese beetles here. They aren't actually Japanese beetles, they're a bit larger than that, but they look the same. I figured one had still been in the house and somehow gotten itself worked in there. To my surprise, what plopped out of the hole was HUGE, way bigger than any of those bugs. This thing was some kind of weird, previously undiscovered beetle-monster. This thing was really big, way bigger than any insect should be. That shiny thing next to it is a quetzal which is slightly smaller than a half-dollar piece.

It was remarkably cute though. Look at it's little face and antennae!

After the pics were taken I squished him and went on with my life. Just kidding! I built him a home in a bush and we both lived happily ever after