Our house was invaded this weekend. Twice.

First, a family of fat, dumb mice decided to come out of hiding and thumb their noses at our fatter, dumber cats. At one point, Meg and I watched incredulously as what surely must have been the world’s fattest mouse literally dragged it’s sagging belly in a complete circle around Sassafras, and then in a final kiss-my-ass salute, it actually crawled across her paws while she did nothing but sit there, motionless, watching.

Finally, our gay transvestite cat, Zeta, came to the rescue. After living at the Flying W ranch for four years, he finally hiked up his skirt and showed the other cats how it was done and wiped out two mice in one evening.

The next evening, Meg and I were firmly planted in front of the TV, getting our dose of head crack (that’d be season two of “24″) when the cats (who are at least good for this one thing) alerted us to our second invasion. Because we live in a crappy old, falling-down, piece of crap house, things occasionally go wrong. Say, like the roof leaking, saturating 70-year-old plaster that then succumbs to gravity leaving a gapping hole into the ‘tween-floors crawl space that’s attached to the gapping hole in the rotted soffits by a lot of dark, musty air. The sort of dark musty air that grackles just love.

We stood up to investigate, only to have a grackle smack into the upstairs door’s window. I immediately started planning how I was going to beat the bird into a pulp with the kitchen broom, then stuff its tenderized remains back in the attic and forget the whole thing.

Meg, thinking a little more rationally, went around to the front of the house and opened the door, let the bird out, then cleaned the bird shit off the stairs.