Dave's Laziness Saves the Day!

If you haven't been following my life (which you should) then I'll give you the quick update, and I've got to warn you, there's been a lot of ins and outs, a lot of what-have-you's and a lot of strands . . . and if you have been following my life, then skim ahead to the new shit that has come to light:

1) the story so far: last week, a pregnant raccoon invaded our attic and had babies, and she did this the day before the insulation guys came to insulate the attic and so when they went up there to pump in the cellulose, they were chased away by an irate mother raccoon who was very concerned about protecting her kits-- kits which were mewling and sleeping directly over our heads in our bedroom; we called a raccoon guy and he came and threw some male scent up there-- which usually causes them to vacate-- and we saw how she got in: she tore off a screen I had stapled under a roof vent (to keep the squirrels out) and we learned that raccoons are much stronger and craftier than squirrels, and then we learned that this particular raccoon was much more stubborn than other raccoons-- the raccoon guy had to come back three times (unprecedented) and the raccoon was especially aggressive, so he had to hurl bamboo javelins of scent back to where the nest was (under the eaves) because the mother was confronting him at the access hole (and this section of the attic is really just a crawl space)

2) the new shit: after a final trip to our house Thursday afternoon, the raccoon guy declared the attic raccoon free, which was quite a relief, and he gave me some big washers and heavy duty screws and told me to use those to affix the screen, as they were raccoon-proof; at this point, I probably should have gotten up on the ladder and made the attic raccoon-proof, but it was almost time for soccer practice and I had just downloaded the Ultimate Guitar app on our Ipad and so instead of screwing in the screen, I played "Don't Go Back to Rockville" while my kids got their cleats and shin-guards on; at this point my wife came home and I told her the good news and she told me that she really thought I should screw in the screen, but I told her that the raccoons weren't coming back and I would do it tomorrow and she told me she wanted to "go on the record" as saying that it was really stupid to put this chore off, especially after all we had been through, but then we had to go to soccer, and when I got home from coaching, I grabbed a bite to eat and took a shower-- in the meantime my friend Connell showed up, as it was pub night; and my wife went "on the record" with Connell as to how I should affix the screen and made it clear to him that she would kill Dave if the raccoons came back due to Dave's indolence, and then I came down and pleaded my case-- I wanted to get a respiration mask at Home Depot and maybe some extra metal screen and mainly I didn't feel like going up there and doing the job and that I would definitely tackle the project tomorrow, and then I went upstairs to get a sweatshirt and I thought I might have heard something in the attic-- but maybe not, because I was starting to hear things all the time, due to a sleepless week of listening to raccoons every night; so then we went to the pub and it was a big night-- lots of people were out and there was much convivial dart-playing with the locals-- and it was getting late (12:30 AM) but we were shooting bulls in a game of cricket (which can take forever) when my phone rang and, of course, it was Catherine and she said "guess what? I heard something" and hung up, so I high-tailed it out of the pub (after taking two more turns at the bull) and when I got home she called me a "selfish lazy asshole" and I agreed with her and told her I was completely wrong and that I should have manned-up and gotten up there immediately and that I had no excuse except that "I didn't want to" and then we heard another sound later in the night and figured it was the mother leaving for the last time (perhaps she forgot her phone?) and we didn't hear the babies so we assumed that she carried them to a new spot (which is what the raccoon guy said would happen) and I got up early-- bleary eyed and slightly hungover-- and accepted my punishment: I set up the ladder and climbed into the dusty, nasty crawl space (without a dust mask) and stapled the screen into place and then I promised Catherine I would screw it in tight when I got home from school; despite the lack of sleep and the late-night scolding from my wife, it was still a fun day at work-- I got to recount the story and issue a dire warning to my students about the consequences of procrastination and I planned to get Catherine some flowers with a note attached that read "You Were Right!" to restore marital bliss, and just after I gave my last period of the day a much anticipated "raccoon update" my phone rang, and even though I was teaching, I answered it . . . it was my wife and she said, "the raccoons are still in there, call me as soon as you can" and then-- in a sequence of texts and phone calls-- I learned that when the insulation guy went up to finish blowing cellulose into the other side of the attic, the side you can stand in, he was attacked again and he literally had to jump through the attic access hole at the top of the stairs (a bigger hole than the one in our bedroom) and then the raccoon retreated to a deep recess in the attic where the old house met the new house, so Mark (the most heroic insulation guy in the universe) went back up there and covered that spot with a roll of fiberglass insulation and then Wayne -- the contractor, also a great guy and extremely good-natured about this insanity-- came over with a thermal sensor (which looks like a large stud-finder, but costs eight grand) and located the nest; the kits were behind Alex's closet; so he drilled a two inch hole, and when I arrived home from work, I was able to see the babies through this hole, you could poke them, and apparently the mom was somewhere in this recess as well, somewhat trapped by the insulation; Mark also reported there was some other carcass (with maggots on it) in the recess next to this one-- it was either a squirrel or a raccoon, he couldn't tell and he couldn't get it out until the mother raccoon was gone; the raccoon guy came back over and said he didn't realize that the mother could get to the other side of the attic and he recommended laying down more scent in the attic and in the nest hole, and promised she would soon vacate, but Wayne -- the contractor-- wanted to get the job done as soon as possible and was seriously thinking about cutting a hole in the closet wall and trying to capture the mother and get her out that way; there was an interesting, slightly confrontational showdown between the contractor and the raccoon guy, with each of them questioning the other's methods, but the raccoon guy finally convinced Wayne that a cornered raccoon is a vicious dangerous, disease-ridden beast, and Wayne decided he would just have to finish the job later; now all this was compelling drama, but this is what is truly important about the story;

3) part three . . . the moral: what's truly important here is that Dave is no longer in trouble and, in fact, his wife even said that Dave's laziness was "a blessing in disguise" because if Dave would have permanently affixed that screen-- as his wife suggested-- then the mother would have either been trapped in the attic and ripped her way out, or perhaps, she would have been "locked" out of the attic and done serious damage trying to get back in, or she would have abandoned her babies and they would have died in there, creating a horrible stench; so marital bliss was restored (without flowers) and I was a hero in the manner of Hamlet; at this point I decided to switch things up and actually do some stuff, so I reconnected with my eccentric animal trapping neighbor Leonard-- who I hadn't spoken with since this incident-- and though he had given up trapping animals and driving them far from the borough, he was extremely helpful and set me up with a nice metal trap and warned me six way to Sunday about how mean and nasty raccoons were and how they would "rip your arm off" and so I put the trap up in the attic just for extra insurance (baited with marshmallows and peanut butter) and broke the access panel while doing this, so I had to pull out some plywood and cut a new panel-- which was scary because it meant the attic was wide open and that crazy animal was definitely up there-- but I got that done and the panel back in place and then we went to dinner for my grandmothers 93rd birthday, dropped the kids at my parents' house because our house was a mess and full of dust and debris, and then Catherine and I returned home and quickly fell asleep . . . and in the middle of the night Catherine heard the mother carrying out all the babies and in the morning we checked the hole in the closet and the babies were gone . . . so I stapled the screen in place -- very lazily-- and if that loosely affixed screen stays put, then we know we are raccoon free and I can get up there and screw it in, and if not, I'll be writing another extremely long sentence; again, to reiterate, the point of this story is that Dave's Laziness looked like it might undo him, but instead his unmitigated sloth saved the day!

My Dog is in the Doghouse (and a Raccoon is in MY House)

We take good care of our dog, and he has an excellent life: plenty of walks, the occasional backwoods vacation, and lots of love . . . but apparently he doesn't appreciate this, because he has one responsibility-- protect the house!-- and in this regard, he has failed us . . . last week, the insulation guy was finishing up the job, running the cellulose hose into the attic, but he had to beat a hasty retreat from the attic when a mother raccoon, who was protecting a litter of raccoon kits, hissed at him-- kits which are feeding and shitting and urinating right above our bed; I am tempted to toss the dog through the attic access hole, but I know he'd get his ass kicked, so he's lying in a sunbeam now, letting any kind of vermin onto our property and into our attic, pretending not to understand all the grief I've been giving him (and, to add insult to injury, because of the dog's negligence we had to get a "raccoon guy" to spray some male scent up there to encourage the mom to relocate, and apparently-- as I haven't met him-- my wife thinks he's hot . . . so I'm sure she's going to be hearing raccoon all over the place so she can invite him back to "spray his scent" . . . and, honestly, if the scent gets rid of the raccoon, then I'll gladly let my wife flirt with him . . . or whatever it takes-- she did manage to get a "cash" discount from him and I'm inquiring as to how-- because the raccoon are still up there and neither my method-- blasting a radio at them-- nor my son Ian's method-- blasting his trombone at the ceiling-- have had any effect on them . . . the above photo was taken by the raccoon guy and this is the actual raccoon in our attic).

Are Raccoon Good or Evil?

I'm having trouble focusing on anything besides the family of raccoon in our attic-- apparently-- according to our raccoon guy-- we have a very special raccoon mother up there: until our case, the raccoon guy never had to lay a third round of male scent, and he's also never had a raccoon confront him the way ours did . . . she came right up to the attic access hole and wouldn't let him enter, so he had to spread the scent (which smelled incredibly rank) on a piece of cloth wrapped around a bamboo javelin and chuck it back to where the nest is . . . anyway, the raccoon and the kits will eventually leave on their own, but the question is how much damage will they do in the meantime, and there's definitely no consensus on that-- if you visit this site , then you can live peacefully with your raccoon guests until they vacate, but if you go here,  then raccoon are a menace that will cause thousands of dollars of damage and give you and your family roundworms (I think the second site might be pest control propaganda, but it's still scary stuff . . . so I attempted my own last-ditch tactics: I propped my guitar amp on a stack of pillows and hassocks so it was a foot from the ceiling and tried to blast them out with power chords and feedback and then I tossed some tennis balls soaked with bleach back toward the nest, but no luck with either ploy).

Quarantine Workouts (Mental and Physical)

I am proud to announce that my son Ian and I completed a set of six sprints up "Deadman's Hill" on Monday. This is one more than our last effort. We're trying to build up to 8 reps. "Deadman's Hill" is a steep incline at the end of our block-- the sprint is a tenth of a mile (528 feet) and (according to Google maps) you gain fifty feet of elevation during the run. That's about a ten percent grade. It's brutal. We always finish morning workouts during double sessions at the hill, and the soccer players do several sets. Coach runs them in class order-- seniors, juniors, sophomores, freshman-- so they get a bit of a rest in between. We did not have this luxury. We ran up, walked down, and did it again. My son Ian (14 years old) is 99 pounds, so he had an easier time than me. I think I maxed out my heart rate and then some. I will provide a video of the final interval the next time we do it. It will be slow and disturbing. 

Tuesday morning, my sixteen-year-old son Alex told me that after everyone went to bed, he got a video call from a tennis player buddy of his. Ten students were trying to do 10,000 push-ups in one day, but they needed help. It was getting late and they weren't going to make it. From 11 PM to 11:45 PM, Alex did 450 push-ups. This put them over the top. A couple kids did over 2000 push-ups in a 24 hour period. Alex is very sore.

My mind is also obviously working overtime to process all the new normal, and I don't have to get up as early as norm, so I'm actually remembering some of my dreams. While I normally never talk about dreams or want to hear other people's dreams, we are in weird times. Perhaps they are premonitions.

Dream #1

I was attending an interminable faculty meeting in the auditorium-- it was dark and boring and I was getting sleepy-- but my only ray of hope was that my friend and colleague Zach had smuggled a baby raccoon into the meeting and he was going to release it at the appropriate moment to cause maximum chaos. I helped concoct the plan, but my friend had the raccoon in a bag. We didn't sit next to each other, to avoid suspicion. I was waiting and waiting for him to release the baby raccoon, the meeting was so boring, but he was stalling. I was frantically signaling to him. Release the raccoon! Release the raccoon!

He finally did and it climbed up the wall, like a monkey, and made it's way to the stage. Everyone freaked out. Pretty sweet dream.

Dream #2

Warning: this one is not as sweet. I was at a funeral, but in an open field, more like a party. It seemed similar to the memorial for an actual fraternity buddy who died in a motorcycle crash many years ago (but it was not for this person). When I inquired about the person who died-- a college friend of mine-- my friend Joe told me that guy's funeral happened the day before . . . I had missed it, gotten the date wrong, and that this funeral was for another college friend (who had died at yesterday's memorial event). I was totally broken up and surprised and sad. I did not like this dream at all. I'm leaving the names of the dead people out of this for obvious reasons, I don't want to hex anyone. I hope I'm not clairvoyant.

It's All the Same Thing (No New Tails to Tell)

It was 4:14 on Friday afternoon, and I was cutting up old deck boards so I could put them in contractor bags and toss them, when I saw a rustling in the ivy by our fence; upon closer inspection, I found that the rustling was being caused by a cub raccoon -- which was very cute and about the size of a fuzzy chipmunk -- so I called the boys and retreated to the deck, and soon enough -- as I predicted -- a mama raccoon came scurrying down the tree with the big hole in it, and then she did something I didn't expect, she whacked and bit the hell out of the baby raccoon, then walked away for a moment, and waited, but the baby didn't follow, and then she walked back over and used her mouth to pick up the cub by the scruff of his neck, and carried him back up the tree to the big hole, which is obviously their home, so that the recalcitrant cub could learn the definition of nocturnal and write it a thousand times on the inside of their hole . . . and at first my kids thought the mommy raccoon was mean, but when I pointed out that we chastise them for similar dangerous activities -- such as crossing the street without looking or wrestling at the top of the stairs -- they understood what was going on, but I don't think that just because they understand the analogy means they are going to behave with any more common sense.

Meet The Neighbors . . . Yikes.

Hurricane Sandy inspired much communal sentiment in our neighborhood -- we live in a small town and so we are already friendly with the majority of our neighbors -- but folks really came out of their shell in the aftermath of the hurricane . . . and so when I rounded the corner with my dog and walked past the grouchy old man's house with the immaculate lawn and giant RV, I wasn't particularly surprised when he walked out of his garage and spoke to me -- though he had never gave me the time of day before this -- and I took him up on his offer to "give my dog a biscuit," which he pulled out of a bin in his incredibly crowded but organized garage, which was full of ham radio equipment, tools, and miscellaneous unidentifiable clutter; it turns out that he is a Lab lover and recognized that my dog was part Lab, and so these biscuits in his garage were reserved only for folks with a Lab (he had no dog of his own, and in retrospect, this strikes me as odd that he had a large container of MilkBones at the ready) and then he lured us into his backyard -- he said, "You want to see something?" and, of course I did, and he showed us a raccoon he had recently trapped, which was in a cage and had one weirdly cataracted blue eye and he said as soon as gas was available, that he was going to drive the raccoon out into the country and release him, and then he told me that he had trapped "at least five hundred possum" over the years and that he had taken on a mission to "keep the borough clean," and that meant trapping squirrels, possum, skunks, raccoons, and other wildlife and then driving this captured wildlife far away -- even to different states! -- in his RV and releasing the wildlife back into the wild . . . and about this time I was beginning to feel like that raccoon in the cage, and I was wondering if the old man was going to trap me and drive me far away in his RV, but while we were talking the power, which had returned for twenty minutes, went out again, and so we had to talk about that, and then he started confiding in me about his neighbors, who were maliciously channeling their gutter spigots at his property, in order to wash away his yard, and then he showed me the retaining wall he was building to thwart their evil plan, and then-- finally!-- I was able to make my escape . . . and I'll be glad when this catastrophe is over and people go back to their normal, misanthropic ways.

Unnatural Action

Two animal encounters: over the weekend:

1) while I was running along the Raritan, I saw a blue heron acting in a deranged manner, listing from side to side and then finally collapsing into a heap, where it eyed my warily like some miniature feathered reptile-- and so when I got home I called several numbers until I reached Ranger Headquarters, and I told them the situation, and the next day the heron was gone, but I want to know what happened . . . I should have told the dispatcher to call me back once she had a full report of the incident so I could have some closure . . . can a heron get West Nile disease?

2) last night, our contractor went into the crawl space to retrieve some of his tools and he found a big fat raccoon in there, so he flushed him out, and after the raccoon went down the red and yellow plastic kiddie slide in our yard he climbed over the fence and into the neighbor's yard-- but not until one of the workers tossed a soccer ball at him.

Let's Celebrate Dave's Indolence For Another Day

And after the Creation of Yesterday's Sentence and The Permanently Affixing of The Raccoon Proof Screen, Dave rested (although not all night, as at 3 AM, he did hear the mother raccoon on the roof attempting to get back in to the attic, but she was foiled by the screen).

High Heels and a Morning Surprise

There's no question that when you're hard at work, it's always exciting to a get an unexpected text from your lovely wife, especially when it mentions high heels and a dress . . . but there wasn't much innuendo in this strand (also, note the lack of punctuation and spelling error-- she was obviously freaked out). I read between the lines and understood that I was going to be the one to remove the eviscerated dead rabbit from the low-ceilinged shed under the porch, which I might add, is populated with billions upon billions of those creepy long-legged cave crickets.

And for those of you that care, the dead rabbit is now in a plastic bag in our trash. I shoveled it out. I'm not sure what got to it, maybe a fox or a raccoon-- or perhaps it was our dog, Lola, as there was a tennis ball placed on top of the corpse--but needless to say, it wasn't pretty (unlike my wife in her dress).

My Children Weren't the Only Animals in Florida

I would never visit the Naples Florida area again -- too much driving, too much development, too many strip malls, and too many cars -- but the paradoxical thing is that in between car rides (and boat rides) we saw an enormous amount of flora and fauna; we visited several parks (including Delnor-Wiggins State Park, Barefoot Beach, Keywaydin Island, Big Cypress National Preserve, and Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary) and here is an incomplete list of the stuff we saw: Cuban brown anoles, Cuban tree frogs, snowy egrets, ladyfish, lizard fish (apparently, you can put any word in front of "fish" and it is a legitimate fish) blue runner, mangrove snapper, spanish mackerel (we were catching these fish in a boat, and as we reeled them in the dolphins almost ate them, and -- according to my dad's friend-- the owner of the boat-- dolphins occasionally jump in the boat chasing a fish . . . and after we caught the fish, we fed them to the dolphins, which was very fun) a bunny, a bald eagle catching a fish, osprey, pelicans, cormorants, LOTS of big alligators, a baby alligator, a wood stork, a hawk, blue herons, green-backed herons, tri-colored herons, a yellow-crowned night heron, vultures, ibis, sandwich tern, kingfishers, woodpeckers, raccoon, big turtles, snook, alligator gar, a giant water spider, and a school of rays (which Alex and I saw while standing on a paddleboard, and from that vantage point you realize that there's all kinds of stuff swimming around you in the gulf, and that it's best not to think about it).

Sloth is Always the Solution

I learned this lesson weeks ago, but last Friday-- possibly due to lack of sleep or just general raccoon-mania, not only did I misplace my beloved green coffee mug, but I also rashly decided to retrace my steps and find it, instead of relying on my inherent laziness and letting the mug make its way back to me; I squandered my entire off-period searching the school: the bathrooms, the copy room, my three classrooms, my car, the office, the lost and found, etcetera . . . but no luck; and then, serendipitously, I ran into the nice lady from guidance (who started the campaign to reunite me with my mug the last time I left it there) and she said, "You left your cup again . . . I sent you an e-mail" and I realized that there was one place I went that I had forgotten-- I had gone to guidance for a moment to pick up a form, and even if someone pointed a gun at me, I wouldn't have remembered stopping there-- and so I went through all that effort, but was still doomed to fail, and I should have just done nothing and let the universe take its course.

Wild Wild Life

Thursday: a list of the wildlife we saw: dolphins, raccoon, gray fox, fiddler crabs, sand crabs, ospreys, herons, terns, pelicans, and-- of course-- bikers (it was bike week).

Youngsters are Cute . . . But F%$% 'em

 

Youngsters ARE cute-- as evidenced by the baby raccoon that Lola and I saw cavorting in a tree at the park-- and they the future, of course, but I was still happy to see Novak Djokovic come back from two sets down against the young Jannik Sinner and watch Nadal finish off Taylor Fritz, who is more than ten years his junior . . . I've talked to quite a few people who are sick of seeing those old pros win over and over (with the possibility of a Federer return?) but I'm rooting for them-- because when they start losing, it means we're all that much closer to obscurity and death.

A Very Cheeky Groundhog

It's been a long time since I've seen a groundhog do anything cheeky (and it still wasn't nearly as cheeky as this) but the drought must be severely depleting whatever groundhogs normally eat, because as we walked down the steps to the pool, my wife looked to her left and said, "There is a large animal on one of the picnic tables eating someone's food," and she was right-- and this was the kind of behavior you expected from a raccoon or cat-- but on closer inspection it was a groundhog, munching away at a ham and salami sub from Park Deli, and I had to swing our pool bag at the groundhog to get it to scamper back into the woods and the sub was ruined, gnawed open and dismantled, and so our friends had to order food from Loui Pizza City.

The Animals Are Wild

Another crisp wildlife photo from yours truly (and possible good news on the alleged raccoon in the attic front . . . yesterday, I climbed into the attic crawl space-- which is not a fun thing to do, as it's filled with loose insulation-- and I saw that the wire guard around the roof vent had been dislodged and pushed in, forming an entry hole-- so Ian and I pushed the wire mesh back in place and reinforced the wire guard around the roof vent with some staples and then last night, I heard some critter on the roof-- trying to get in, scratching at the wire guard-- but I didn't hear any mewling of babies or any critters inside the attic-- so maybe the creatures-- which I believe are raccoons-- will give up and move on to some other poor soul's house and make a nest in their attic).

 

Serendipitous Student Connections #2 (Prank/ Revenge/ Merchant of Venice)

If you're a regular reader, then you are probably acquainted with my new recurring feature (Serendipitous Student Connections) but don't worry if you missed the first episode-- the premise is simple-- sometimes a kid says something in class that is so unexpected that it changes the entire course of the lesson . . . and this doesn't happen that often, because once you've been teaching a number of years, you can predict what most of the responses will be, but once in a while there is the example that surprises you and makes you see the literature in a different light; for instance, in my Shakespeare class, we recently finished 12th Night and are now in the midst of Merchant of Venice, and both these plays have themes of revenge in them (Malvolio's last line in 12th Night is: "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you!" which is an odd-- but deserved-- note on which to end a comedy, and Merchant of Venice revolves around Shylock and his desire for a pound of flesh from his anti-Semite rival Antonio) and Shakespeare is smart enough not to choose sides and instead hold a mirror up to the dark side of human nature and the very real and rational desire for vengeance . . . and so when one of my students walked into class and said his life was starting to resemble Merchant of Venice, I knew that his example was going to be good-- this student is a soccer player and he played a prank on one of his soccer buddies: he had all this player's friends text the player a simple "Congratulations" message and then he created a very persuasive but completely fake web page that named his friend the MVP of the Middlesex County Soccer Tournament-- and his victim, like Malvolio, was a rule-following honorable soul who had played well enough to be deserving of such a title-- and because of this, the victim fell for the article hook, line, and sinker . . . and at this point my student realized that he had to tell the truth to his friend, before he started telling everyone about his "award," which was fictitiously created and digitally distributed on a fabricated web page . . . but when he told his buddy about the prank, he attempted to set the rules of revenge-- he knew his friend would have to seek revenge but he wanted to control exactly how his friend would punish him-- and this is exactly what happens in Merchant of Venice-- but of course it is difficult to dictate vengeance and emotions in contractual terms-- and so my student, who is much smaller than his victim, persuaded his victim that though he absolutely deserved revenge for this emotionally humiliating prank, that the revenge couldn't be physical (because the victim could easily beat up the perpetrator, he's a much larger kid) and had to be in the same genre as his prank-- emotional-- but I explained to him that in the milieu of vengeance, the rules are always broken . . . Osama bin Laden wanted to liberate Muslim holy sites and get revenge for American influence in Saudi Arabia so he blew up civilians in an office tower . . . and then the United States invaded and decimated two entire countries to exact our revenge against bin Laden . . . Whitney and I threw some apples at a door in our fraternity house and it started a cycle of revenge that ended in a friend nailing a dead raccoon to someone's door . . . and so the cycle of revenge is never predictable and never reasonable, and-- as Shakespeare illustrates-- sometimes it takes a woman to put an end to the silliness, because women never hold a grudge . . . right?

Spring Break?

Ian and I woke up at 5:10 AM to go for his ankle surgery, but when we arrived at University Orthopedics, the building was surrounded by fire and police vehicles and enough flashing lights to give you a seizure-- after waiting a few minutes at the edge of the parking lot, we were informed that there was smoke in the building and a generator blew, so there would be no appointments today-- which really sucks because we scheduled this to coincide with my Spring Break and my wife's Spring Break-- which is next week-- so that we could take care of Ian while he's incapacitated-- and though I went to bed early, I did NOT get a good night's sleep because it seems that a raccoon has broken into our attic (which happened once before-- quite a tale) and it was making noise through the night-- probably pregnant female making a nest-- and on our early morning drive, Ian and I saw two raccoons strolling along the sidewalk across the street from our house . . . perhaps they are the culprits-- so it seems my Spring Break will consist of scheduling the animal removal guy and the roof guy; grading all the essay I received right before break-- the quarter ends right when we get back; going to PT for my torn calf; rescheduling Ian's surgery, and coaching tennis . . . no wet t-shirt contests for me.