Remember how I mentioned a while back that I have been feeding the neighbor’s cat on my porch due to renovations at her house? Just now I heard a series of sort of odd thumps on the porch, which I thought might be Porch Cat knocking something over.
I opened my front door and there, literally sitting on my welcome mat, was a raccoon. Our eyes met. I gasped and slammed the door shut. I stood there for a moment, processing.
And then, dear reader, my first thought was of you: I went to my desk and grabbed my camera and went back outside.
It turned out to be three raccoons. Young ones, by the looks of it. Masked bandits, on the raid for unsecured cat food.
Adorable, yes, but raccoons kill chickens in the most gruesome ways you can imagine. (Also, rabies.) So they need to, like, not be here.
Hopefully they were just moving through, and will move on to better pastures. I took up the cat food and called the neighbor to let her know we will need to make a new arrangement once she gets home from work.
(I’m feeling better today, by the way, and thank you for the commiseration!)
I’m glad your first thought was us!
Nice picture! Way to keep blogland informed!
I was feeding neighbour cats on their porch, and local racoons got into the rubbermaid and completely polished off the bag of cat food. I bought a fresh bag, and thought I would just be more diligent about putting the lid on the rubbermaid, but they were actually able to pull the secured lid off and empty a second bag. We’re in a very urban neighbourhood, too.
We didn’t get any cute pictures, but they left their telltale footprints all over the porch.
Well, you have been rabies-free since 2004, according to the banner!
And darned proud of it! I feel like I should have a ticker: I Have Gone ______ Days Without Getting Rabies.”
It’s a Good Thing.
Cute, raccoons! We have a family of three that come through occasionally.
I lived in a more wooded area once, and had been feeding a feral cat. Momma raccoon was one heck of a hulk, and I had just come inside after setting out the cat food when she stomped up and started making a weird noise, looking back at one of the trees. And, like they were piling out of a clown car, five kits shimmied down the tree one at a time, and gamboled over to the free grub, one by one until the happy family was all chowing down together. It was freakin’ adorable, but both the feral and I were glad when they moved out.
Raccoons are adorable and ferocious and gluttonous. And smart. And good with their paws. FSM help us if they ever develop opposable thumbs; we would be doomed.
I am glad you are feeling better! I was curious, when you get round to it, which city you think Appaloosa Plains was based on. I never knew there was an intended inspirational city behind each sims town, and though I can think of a dozen cities it might be, Bozeman was at the top of my list. Yea? Nay?
I have come here as a temporary break from my Pets-playing, which-holy crap, the horses!-while awesome, continues to crash fantastically in the sim creator, even in the edit-hairstyle-in-the-mirror phase, once your sim has already been out and about in the world. So, beware! Whatever they did to the graphics to make the animals’ hair shade and layer, it has caused even human hair (I’ve had it happen once now on a beard selection screen and once trying to give a toddler a fauxhawk) to crash the game. Take care! And enjoy! And omgwtfbbq ponies!
*that is, I never knew there was an intended base city behind each sims town, until I read it here.
I have heard that Pets has been REALLY buggy for some people – sorry to hear you’re having trouble, too! I will have to back up my files a lot more frequently, since my computer is a little on the sad side itself.
It’s true that each Sims city is loosely based on a town: Riverside = New York, I think Sunset Valley is LA? That swampy town, that one’s New Orleans. I don’t know about Hidden Springs or Barnacle Bay, though.
Yeah, raccoons and chickens should not mix. We lost several young chickens (our own hatchlings!) to a raccoon last year.
My craziest experience with raccoons was many many years ago while renovating an old house. I was working downstairs when I heard the worst caterwauling EVER from the upstairs bathroom. (It sounded like The Banshee on steroids. On a bad hair day.) Racing upstairs, I discovered a bunch of baby raccoons in the bathtub in a pile of debris, and a VERY pissed-off Mama staring down and screaming at them through a brand-new hole in the ceiling. (And you just know that there was a whole lot of “I told you a thousand times not to play over there! Now look what you’ve done!” going on.
The babies were looking at each other and at Mama, all wide-eyed and embarrassed and “Who, us?” and “Dudes, we are so screwed…”
I scooped them into a cardboard box, and set it under a tree outside. Never saw Mama or babies again. I think she took them and moved to a better neighborhood. The babies are probably still grounded…