we have kitties!

some of you might remember that last year, sometime in the fall, we had a bit of a raccoon issue. What you may not know is that it’s persisted, and our back porch has been a bit of a happy raccoon outhouse since the snow began to fall. I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of fond of my porch, and I’m definitely not so fond of raccoon “presents”.

Thinking it was gone (we hadn’t had any surprises in a while), we set up our porch for the summer, overflowing with herbs and plants and our favourite futon and candles and other fun stuff. So, imagine my surprise when I went to open the porch door one evening last week while I was prepping for ladyfest and came face to face with a 35lb raccoon. (I’ll give you a hint – both of us were not so happy, though only one of us slunk away with our tail between our legs).

Something needed to be done. So, this week, we’ve had a sortof humane (I say sortof because I think that even trapping them is cruel and makes them sort of crazy, but what do you do when they treat your porch like a giant litter box? That is surely not cool.) live-trap hanging out under our porch table, hoping that the raccoon would be enticed by some lovely cat food. Last night, around 2:30 am, it was. Delightful. Did I mention that I sleep next to the porch? Yeah. That was fun. 8 hours of clanging and clawing and desperate unhappiness later, the raccoon has been relocated to somewhere where I hope he’ll find plenty of snacks and no opposition from the humans in the neighbourhood.

This is what raccoons do to your stuff when they are scared and mad:

The moral of this story? Make sure your neighbours don’t leave 30lbs of dog food on their porch for the ENTIRE winter. Otherwise, well, yeah…

I will be there, will you? Pop by and say hello. I am seriously overflowing with stuff this time around.