Whaaa?!

So you can already guess what this post is about.

We awoke Monday morning at the crack of dawn (about 5:00 am) to the loud, raucous cawing of crows outside the window. Right outside the window. Really, obnoxiously loud. I buried my head in the pillow and tried to ignore it until Dave finally got up and stomped over to my side of the bed to slam the window shut. This afforded us enough peace and quiet that we both fell back asleep. Until....

6:00 am. I opened my eyes because something woke me up. But what was it? Hmmm. Footsteps on the roof? Must be those damn crows again. I got up for a drink of water and laid back down ready to try to sleep again, when I heard it. Scratching and footsteps on the drywall ceiling over my head. I froze in denial that I had actually heard anything, my eyeballs darting back and forth as though that would help me to hear better. Nothing. Ok, phew, it was just my imagination. I closed my eyes and...scratch scratch in the wall, right behind my head. I jumped about five feet in the air and landed at the end of the bed facing the wall and my very irritated husband who had slept through the initial scratching and had no idea why I did a round-off back handspring from the bed to wake him up at 6:02 am on a holiday Monday. I made him listen for it, and we both headed downstairs to try to nap in peace, quiet and more denial.

At this point we still weren't sure what it was. Bigger than a mouse? Probably. A rat? Yeesh, I sure hoped not. Squirrel? Raccoon? Couldn't be a raccoon though, how in the world would it have gotten in?

Dave lost the coin toss to decide who would have to poke their head up into the attic to investigate. He popped the hatch and couldn't see anything (thankfully) so I very helpfully offered to tap our bedroom wall to see if he could see anything moving...you know, just to piss off whatever was up there. He still couldn't see anything, but I sure could hear it moving! Eventually I could hear it walking on the soffit outside our bedroom window, so I kept tapping along to wall trying to scare it back the way it came. Dave went outside to see if he could see it come out. I peeked back out the window at him and he motioned for me to come out and see. Sure enough, a raccoon was making its way along our roof line over to some hedges that I never would have guessed would be close enough for a raccoon to bridge the distance. I was wrong.

I know, right? You're thinking, it probably had babies up there. After much Wile E. Coyote type plans to seal off the house from ever being able to be penetrated by such pests again, I decided to call an animal control company and boy was I glad we did. Had we sealed it up and there were babies, the raccoon would have torn 10 more holes in the roof to get in. So the company came out, cleaned up the attic, found that (thankfully) there were no babies, and sealed it all up for us. We're getting the hedges trimmed, too. And that should be the end of the raccoon visitors.

Until they find my vegetable garden...