When I woke up this morning, the last thing I expected to find were raccoons in my yard. I guess I wasn’t expecting to lose my dogs leash either, but you know what I’m talking about.  You have certain guidelines and expectations of how that day’s events will go; and my day did NOT follow my guidelines.  I mean, it started off just as I’d pictured it.  I woke up late because I’d hit snooze on my alarm too many times, I couldn’t find anything for breakfast because I hadn’t been shopping in two weeks, and it took three tries to get my car to start because I need to buy a new battery but I keep shrugging it off.  They were the kinds of things that you knew were going to happen because of your lack of responsibility, but hoped wouldn’t.

My morning went exactly as I had hoped it wouldn’t but had expected it to anyway, so it was no surprise.  It was the evening, when I came home from work, when my day suddenly did a 180 on me.  As the sun started to set I got ready to take my dog, Mitsy, on a walk; the problem was that I couldn’t find her leash; and I know you shouldn’t walk your dog without a leash but since my morning went the way it went, I really didn’t care.  Or at least I didn’t care until I opened my back door to leave and stood face to face with a giant raccoon. As I stood there, mouth gaping wide open like an imbecile, Mitsy took off.  It took me a second to recognize that my dog had just leapt off the porch, barking like a mad-man, in hot pursuit of the raccoon and so I just stood still for a moment longer trying to process what had just happened before I, too ran down the porch after my dog.  The second my foot touched the grass, however, it was met by loud hissing.  I jumped backwards and turned to see three more raccoons in my yard! I wasted no time in running as fast as I could the opposite direction; which, luckily, was the direction I needed to go.

I followed the barking of my courageous pooch across the street into the neighbor’s yard but then lost the sound.  I stopped and listened but Mitsy was not barking anymore.  Having just lost my sense of direction I wandered aimlessly around the lawn, looking for the missing animals.  I breathed a sigh of relief as I came around to the back side of the home and found my little Mitsy sniffing and scratching at the baseboards of their wraparound deck. To make a long story short, the raccoon had wriggled its way past a loose board and was now hiding beneath the deck, and while I was relieved that the raccoon was no longer in my yard, I knew that it was only a matter of time before he came back and joined the other three.  So now I’m here, searching the internet trying to find someone that can get the raccoons out of my yard and put my day back on the path it’s supposed to take.