I Love Penny

Got your back.

I finally named her.  She may be the last groundhog left in this immediate area.  There might be another, but she rules the territory around my windows.  It is possible that she has chased all her sisters and her mother away.  She has claimed the hole she grew up in as her own.  The hole is right next to the building I live in.  The first groundhog I ever named, Sheila, used to live in this hole.  Anyway, her name is Penny.  I think it fits her well.  She's very cute, but, then again, the vast majority of them are.  She's been frightened a little too much lately.
The birds were driving me crazy.  Whoever designed the kitchen fans in these buildings is a real dummy.  Birds seem to think they make perfect bird houses.  Since I love animals, I put up with them for the longest time.  Thump!  That's the sound of a bird landing behind the kitchen fan.  You could hear that several more times than you would ever want to in any given day.  Chirp, chirp, chirp!  Birds make so much noise.  Especially baby birds, who are probably saying "Feed me!" most of the time.  I'd finally had enough.  They made so much noise on a daily basis; they were driving me nuts.  I began to try to scare them away.  They'd make their noise, then I would go over to the fan and tap hard on the outside of it: hoping it would scare them away.  It was just a temporary solution, though.  They always came back.  I called the office about it.  The office manager said they can put a cover on it, but they don't like to, because the fan keeps the units from getting too smoky.
I said, "I don't care about that; these birds are driving me crazy!"  Besides, I don't fry, or burn, anything.  I bake potatoes, boil pasta, and so on.  I never do any smoky cooking.  So they put the cover on.  Things were fine for months, but I recently heard the birds again.  I went outside to look, and, sure enough, the cover came off and was hanging open on one side.  But when I went outside to look, I scared Penny.  She had been grazing, and she ran into her hole when she saw or heard me.  So I called the office again and asked them to put the cover back on.  But the next day, I kept hearing the birds.  Since I saw one of the maintenance guys spraying freakin' bushes, instead of covering my fan, I called the office again to say that no one had done it.  I was told it would be done that day.  I went for a walk.  When I returned, I checked to see if the fan had been covered.  Poor Penny, I scared her again.  She dove into her hole.  But then she stuck her head out to look around: very cute.  Finally, the fan was covered.  And no birds were trapped inside.  There were none in there at the time; I checked.