electricland

Last week the (or a) raccoon came back. Only outside, thank goodness, but it was hangin' out on the not-deck, checkin' out the scene. It was shortly after dark; I came to my senses in time to get my camera and take several pictures which may or may not work out. The flash completely failed to faze it.

This morning I staggered out of bed (having already fielded two phone calls from my parents about the bookshelf) to find it there again, this time in broad daylight, digging at the weak part of the roof where the next-door roofers pulled up some of our tarpaper and didn't put it back properly. I slapped the glass door and yelled, but other than getting it to look at me with an air of enquiry ("It almost seems like you're trying to communicate. How interesting!") had no effect whatever. I almost opened the door to shoo it away and then thought better of the idea -- the little bugger looks like it weighs about 20 pounds now, and its claws are quite impressive. I did eventually shoo it off by banging on the glass about 6 times very fast, but it managed to give the air of leaving because it felt like it, thank you.

The neighbours have reduced their swaybacked garage to a pile of timber.

Today is the yard sale (of Doom).

I was lying in bed disliking the thought of getting up (it starts at 10 and we still have a lot to do) when Jen called "Rob?"

"Yeah?"

"There's a raccoon in the house."

"Huh?" I sat up and looked around wildly. "But nothing's open up here!"

"I saw it going up your stairs."

I got up and looked around. Nope, door shut, screens on. Looked outside and hey, ANOTHER raccoon on the not-deck! Opening the door to let the one inside out was not going to work, obviously.

Jen and I met on the second floor and looked around (cautiously, as we didn't want to corner it). No raccoon.

"We've got Houdini!" Jen said.

The only possibility was that the one I'd seen was the same raccoon and that it had gone out the kitchen window, without disturbing the herbs on the sill, and climbed up the wall to the third floor.

SCREENS NOW.

Jen finally figured out what it was doing in her kitchen: it had fished out Tilde's kibble ball and was eating her kibble. Tilde's going to be SO MAD when she gets back from the cottage.

(can I call this Illustrator practice?)

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.