Freakin' raccoons
I didn't sleep all that well last night. You see, I have a raccoon problem.
I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but it's worth mentioning again now: there is a lumbering fearless little creature with dextrous hands and an insatiable appetite for cat food who comes around in the middle of the night and has pulled a number of B&E's on my apartment.
I'm not kidding. He has actually entered my apartment. I live on the second floor, and I have a balcony with a heavy sliding glass door. This raccoon -- this little thing that weighs probably twenty-five or thirty pounds and looks like something out of a Disney cartoon -- manages to shinny up the wooden beam that leads up to the second floor and open my door.
I've seen him do it. He gets his little hands in the crack between the door and the frame and just pulls. He pullls until it moves. If the door isn't locked, it slides right open -- but I can't stress this enough: that door is heavy. It's a big, eight-foot tall, five-foot wide door in a heavy metal frame, and this little wandering scavenger can open the damn thing. He knows exactly what he's doing when he does it; he walks right up to it and pulls in the right spot. The door is just another obstacle in the way between him and food.
As I said, his food of choice happens to be cat food, namely, my cats' cat food.
Last night at about 5:30 in the old a.m., I hear grunting coming from the living room. Grunting, shuffling, banging into things... after about a minute of this, I decided that this wasn't an episode of my cats' late-night crazies. So I get up. There in the middle of the living room is the twenty-pound light blue bag of IAMS with a little thirty-pound furry creature hunching over it. The bag is ripped open, so it's more of a pile of food on a bright blue placemat, in the middle of my living room. And the balcony door was wide open.
I yell at the thing in my get-the-hell-out-of-my-apartment voice. "AY!" (It's like "hey", but with no "h".) He turns and looks at me. And this is the thing that is both amusing and frustrating for me: he continues eating. The thing has no fear. So I charge him.
Seeing a big six-foot-five guy running at your little one-foot-eleven self has got to be somewhat intimidating if you're in the middle of a meal. He turned and ran. About four feet, and then turned around and looked to see if I was still coming (and he was right -- I had stopped when I saw him turn... intelligent little bugger). So I finished the job. I shooed him onto the balcony and chased him down the wooden post.
Now, this raccoon is not a bad guy, but I don't like the thing in my apartment. Uninvited. He's not like David Leisure on Empty Nest -- he can't come over just whenever he pleases to steal stuff out of my fridge. I'm thinking I would install some anti-raccoon netting or some such on my balcony, but since I'm moving in about six weeks, it won't be worth the effort.
So there you have it. Thus the sleepiness today. Might I mention: it isn't good for the restorative process to have your cycle interrupted by a home invasion.
Posted by Matt at July 9, 2003 10:43 AM
