Wow this is great

Thanks for putting this blog together, Joe. I don't remember being quite so heroic with the bat, but if you remember it that way who am I to change history?

When I was 6 we lived in a 2-story cottage on Lake Mendota in Madison, WI. I loved that place because in the back yard was the largest lake in the Madison chain-of-lakes and across the road in the front was a huge swamp (or at least that was what we called it...these days I think it is called a riparian wetland). We built a tree house in the swamp and played "Swamp Fox" (for you young'uns that was an old Walt Disney adventure about a Revolutionary War hero, Francis Marion...kind of like Robin Hood).

One of the most most fascinating features of the swamp was actually along the path we used to walk to elementary school (2nd grade). It was a large box culvert but I didn't know what that was at the time. To us it was "Frankensteins Cave." I remember well that we truly believed a monster lived inside, on the other side of a bottomless hole that only he could cross, because from time to time there would be boots, snakes, pieces of clothing, and other "evidence" lying in front of the mouth of the cave that he had tossed out instead of eating. Sometime before I actually designed these things as a Civil Engineer I learned the harsh reality that all these discarded items are actually washed into the storm sewer and carried away to where the box culvert empties into a drainage channel.

So why did your initial post remind me of this? At this cottage, we once heard noises in the attic. When my Dad went to investigate, he found flying squirrels (no moose, though). Of course, we were in a lake cottage, so he used a fishing net to round them up. That is why my first thoughts were of a fishing net and why you kids will look for a fishing net when some wild critter invades your home some day.