electricland

Let me start from the beginning.

Last night I helped

life_on_queen move Stuff from her apartment to my porch in preparation for the Yard Sale of Doom. We needed my parents' car for this, which for most of the day was in Alliston while my parents were at an OMB hearing, so there was much phoning back and forth and updating and rescheduling and I went to Designer Discount Fabrics to buy curtain fabric and stopped at Bakka to buy books and got home a bit after 7 to wait for them and have something to eat. It was filthy hot, so I opened the door on the third floor and then forgot all about it.

Some hours later, when we'd finished and had a beer and gone our separate ways, I got back home and headed up to bed. Remember yesterday's raccoon encounter? The same one, or a relative, was out on the not-deck again. I cooed a bit -- they are incredibly cute -- told it to bugger off, hung up my laundry, and went to bed.

This morning I noticed some crud on the floor in the hall that I didn't remember seeing before. My housekeeping is substandard, but I thought surely I would have noticed chunks of plaster lying around in the hall. So I looked around some more and noticed raccoon footprints in the hall and on one of the chairs in the living room. No destruction evident. I peered around some more -- the dining room was fine, the bathroom was fine -- and then headed into the kitchen.

Where I found the remains of a barbecued chicken, which had been on the bottom shelf of my fridge, lying on the rug.

It certainly solves the question of what I'm going to do with the rest of the chicken. It also suggests I'll be doing some serious cleaning in the near future.

(There were raccoon footprints in Jen's kitchen too, but I don't know if it got anything down there.)

So to recap: this raccoon climbed up the outside of the house to the third floor, walked in through the open door, went down to the second floor, opened my fridge, pulled out the chicken, ate the chicken, wandered around some more poking into things, and left.*

I'm getting a screen door.

*Jen points out that they only seem to leave the same way they came in, so it presumably came in the door on the third floor, walked down two flights of stairs in its wanderings and chicken-stealing, and then walked back upstairs to go out the third floor door again. I'm just glad it doesn't seem to have been in the house while I was there.