Masked Bandits

It hasn’t been a great week. Monday and Tuesday I was at a workshop that was basically a waste of time. The only good thing to come out of it was that every organization briefing told the office in charge that their process was flawed from the very beginning – something we have been telling them, but they weren’t listening. Now maybe they’ll do something. But since no one was tasked with doing anything, I still have my doubts.

Tuesday morning I also had a class on the federal employment system, one I’d been looking forward to. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that great. Too broad brush to get into the details I needed. And they changed the location at the last minute, so I was late (I had taken the metro and a shuttle bus, so I was on foot). And the room was very crowded and consequently very hot and stuffy. I spent the first part of class sitting on a piano bench.

Wednesday, yesterday, was a really bad day at work. We’re entering our busiest time of the year, and I’m just swamped (which is why spending two whole days at events that weren’t productive was really annoying). And I found out that I had overlooked something a couple weeks back, and had now missed a suspense – but not a suspense for me, a suspense for someone else who had wanted to get something published. This is a long-time colleague and so I was feeling pretty bad about it.

And then…

When I pulled into the driveway last night, at only a few minutes to 8pm, since I’d worked late, there standing in the middle of the driveway right in front of one of the garage doors, was a very large raccoon.

Now, normally, I would think this was a really cool thing, as I love being able to see wildlife, and there was a part of me that was going, “neat!”, as it stared at the car for a moment, and then sauntered off along the porch and around the corner of the house. But unfortunately the first thing that crossed my mind was what would have happened if the raccoon was in the driveway when I let the dogs out in the evening. This just added to the stress of the day.

When I finally did let the dogs out of their new kennels, after turning on all the floodlights and walking around the house with a flashlight, the dogs immediately picked up on the raccoon’s scent, and were going nuts outside, and even inside most of the evening. They were just all wound up, which wasn’t helping my mood.

And to top it all off, the TiVo was acting up again – I had to unplug and restart it, and it spontaneously turned off and restarted itself twice during the evening, so the stuff I was trying to record is going to have breaks in it.

Needless to say, I was not in a very good mood when Amb Bob got home from the HOG meeting late in the evening, and I tried not to ‘bark’ at him. He wisely went upstairs and left me alone.

This morning I’m back to thinking the raccoon thing is cool; I just have to make sure I take appropriate precautions (like turning on the outside floodlights before letting the dogs out, and making noise when I open the door, before the dogs go out). When I let the dogs out before I went to bed last night, I saw a dark shadow go along the far side of the orange construction fence and into the big pine trees separating our yard from our neighbors. The only dog to spot that shadow, too, was Jodeo. She went to investigate, but fortunately didn’t start barking and didn’t pursue outside of our yard.

I’m also going to have to check up on raccoons today. Amb Bob spotted two large raccoons in the woods patch behind our house on Sunday morning; I’m sure one of them was the one I saw around the house. I’m actually surprised that we haven’t seen more raccoons in the time we’ve been at the house. The little patch of woods behind our house is perfect raccoon habitat, with lots of dead and fallen trees, and surrounded on three sides by corn fields. The only thing it’s missing is a stream, and it’s a little small – too small, I think, to support two raccoons. So, I need to look up and see when breeding season is for raccoons, and when they have their kits. And territory size. It may just be that these two are swinging through their territory and just spending a few days in our area.