Pests

So... we have this raccoon... or family of raccoons... or maybe Rottweilers?... living in the attic...
This would perhaps not be so bad, were it not that the distance between us and said attic was that of an old and buckling layer of plaster.
One morning, one weekend morning... of course... one of the two/week kevin gets a chance to do the much loved 'sleep in' , and these fuckers had a 'domestic disturbance' like I have never been witness to before.
There was yelling (in the form of these insipid , and relentless barks), and running, and a good deal of thumping and scrabbling of long fingernails, claws?..., against the ceiling above our no longer sleeping heads.
gross.
We have learned the bastards' sleeping habits, and to our great fortune, know for certain, that he arrives home from his night's foraging, oh, just a tiny bit, INCREDIBLY ANNOYINGLY early in the morning, and wakes up, stretches his nasty dirty claws, and sets out from his bedroom in the eave that rises up above our kitchen table, just exactly at the time we are halfway through dinner.
gross.
So last night, as we were enjoying salmon cooked in capers and onions and lemon juice, with broccoli and brown rice, we heard our habitual intruder doing his nauseating scrabble of wake. After being forced to 'shut-up' (a result that came with reluctance and a good many hostile - but silent - glares in his declaration at THIS request... "What would make me HAPPY, would be for you to SHUT-UP") we listened like captives in the trunk of a car, to discern any sign of the direction this vermin used to exit the house.
It TOTALLY didn't work.
Kevin insisted the thing was playing possum and standing stock still in the attic above our heads...
taxidermy style...
i liked the thought...
so, when he heard the beast twitching about some time later he rushed out the door to 'try and get a visual'...
(dork)
it was after him being gone ... Mr. Shush-Up-YOU'RE-Wrecking-It himself... that I listened and easily discerned where the monster was headed. To the bathroom...
Have I mentioned that this thing travels through the wall?...
And having seen the thing now, I understand better why it was that it made such noise trying to cram it's fat ass in the narrow space of our walls...
gross.
So, I called down to Kevin, who's big smacking footsteps I heard pass by the window below me, and he got himself in a position to watch above from where I stood, and sure enough, the raccoon appeared. I walked to the fire escape by our kitchen in time to come literally face to face with a large pink handed raccoon, that was reaching it's little pink fingered hand onto a branch of the tree that bordered our house.
cute.
So, Kevin, in this bizarre panic... I mean the thing was still in the tree by the time he came barreling up... yelled all "ER-like" "Get me my saw!! STAT!!!"... well ok... he didn't say 'stat'... but the manic immediacy in his voice was all genuine...
hilarious.
He then proceeded to cut every branch of every tree that looked as though it could be remotely reached by our unwelcome roomie.
I would also like to interject a bit of self-righteousness here and include the fact that on more than one occasion I had asked him how it was that he was SO positive that there were NO WAYS IN from the roof, to be told that he could see EVERY part of it from his various positions of study. When he declared that the thing must indeed be emerging from directly above the bathroom I immediately asked "but I thought you could see the whole roof and there were no holes" to which he responded easily, "well yeah, I can see everything BUT the flat part right above the bathroom"
jackass
hm... "No Ways Inn" would be a pretty rockin' name for a B&B...
and I'm off...

fattest raccoon via Neatorama