About a week ago, I was stepping out the door to pick up a few odds and ends at the store. It was about 11:30 in the evening. When I opened the front door, I was greeted by the sound of frantic clawing against sheet metal. I turned to my left to see a raccoon clamoring up the drain pipe on the side of the house. The pipe makes a turn and sits relatively flat for a foot before connecting to the gutter. The raccoon reached this section and was hanging by only its two front paws. It was about three feet away from my face.
As a side note, I’m not a raccoonologist. In fact, I’m not even sure there is such a profession. Regardless of how little I know of raccoons, I was at this point aware that “it” was a she.
She paused her frantic scrambling for a moment and looked at me. She cocked her head to the side and opened her mouth. She sat for that moment just looking at me like that. I started laughing at the face she made, and she scrambled up to the roof and disappeared. I didn’t think too heavily on the matter.
Four days later, I was out in the yard enjoying the sunshine and talking with a few friends and I happened to look up. There on the apex of the roof sat the raccoon. She was sitting up on her haunches just watching us. I pointed her out. She leaned forward and slipped into the attic vent. My roommates and I were less than amused.
We called pest control, and they sent an employee out to look into the problem. He went up into the attic in a fresh pressed white button-up shirt, khakis, and shined shoes. When he emerged from the attic he was covered in shit. By “shit” I mean feces, insulation, and who knows what else. He informed us that our attic houses raccoons, rats, mice, squirrels, ants and lots of birds. Our house is a health hazard apparently.
The next night I went to sleep early. I was preparing to take the Fundamentals of Engineering exam in the morning. I awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of the raccoon either in heat or having very loud sex. It went a little like this:
“Eek eek eek eek eek eek eek eek eek eek eek eek eek eek eek eek eek eek eek eek…”
This was repeated with short pauses interspersed which must have been when she was catching her breath. I thought to myself, “It’s ok. She’ll be gone in a few days.”
It is certainly less than ok.
Last night, I was working on some equations by myself in the office/study room. I heard a dripping noise coming from the kitchen. I went to investigate. What ensued can be best described by sharing the thoughts as they came to my mind.
Something’s dripping into the sink.
Is a pipe leaking? No, the pipes are in the crawlspace not the attic.
It’s a kind of yellowish-brown color.
It smells bad.
It smells like pee.
IT’S RAINING PEE IN THE KITCHEN!!!
@&$^ &*#$ #&@% @&$% !*@^ (!^# !#*!^# #$@^###$@ @@^!$#@!!## RACCOON!!!!!!!!
I called up the roommate to help me clean the urine. I bleached the pee. I wiped up the bleach and thought it would be good to just soak the entire kitchen in cleanser. It was. There is a window over the sink and the pee had run down the blinds into the sink. We took the blinds out to the dumpster. I looked up and the raccoon was poking her head out of the attic vent watching us.
I like to think that the reason she was poking her head out was to get some fresh air. It is my deepest hope that even she could not stand the stench of her own vile urine. In all honesty though, she was probably just laughing at us.
This just served to piss off the roommate. He grabbed a combat knife and a flashlight and went up into the attic. He was in there for a while, but the raccoon evaded him.
