Retail Therapy

For those who don’t know for the last couple of weeks we’d regularly been having a raccoon visitor frequent our house. He started out mainly eating our cats kibbles. Things quickly progressed into him looking around for other food, opening cupboards and routinely washing his hands in our cat waterbowl. The final straw was one morning when I discovered that he had opened our bread box and had grabbed three slices of bread and a bag of pumpkin seeds. He ate about 3/4 of one slice and pretty much shredded up the other two while deciding that pumpkin seeds were not his thing.

This countertop carnage was the last straw. Luckily we have friends in high places who have access to Havahart animal traps. We borrowed one on saturday, baited it up and went out for a drink. Whilst drinking I kept talking about how psyched I was to come home and have captured this bread eating machine. I was planning on taking pictures and generally make a big to do of it all.

When we got home and flicked on the back porch light everything changed. I saw a furry little guy who was scared/bummed. I thought “what have I done”.. I couldn’t take a picture and instead offered a towel over his cage to keep him warm and maybe calm him down a little. I wanted to release him to the wild right then but I had been drinking and driving was not an option. It’s a good thing none of my bikes currently have a basket on them or some kind of bizarre ET type scene might have gone down.. I guarantee that wouldn’t have ended well.

The next morning was worse. He’d pulled in the towel I gave him and shredded it up into a little bed. It was hard to look at. We grabbed the cage and took him to our determined drop off point. We gave him the option to go totally into the wild or back towards more houses if he felt necessary. He lumbered away about 20 yards and then stopped and turned to look at me. His eyes said it all… “You fucking suck”.

I got back in the car.. twittered.. felt bad.. and then happened upon a garage sale. I then bought something that cheered me up a bit.

I still was feeling a little blue so when we found our next garage sale I bought this hat.

legend has it that a fisherman owned it!

My new hat and hamms beer bear helped but I can’t help but wonder how our little guy is doing. I’m glad we didn’t name him like we had talked about. My guess is he’s found a new cat door but part of me hopes that he is pulling fish out of a stream or whatever it is his forefathers did.. you know, before people messed everything up.

Take care my raccoon friend.