Ricky Raccoon

Lisa and I bought a house built in 1955 for the charm. Her grandmother thought we were nuts.

“You could get something new for the same price,” she told us.

“Yeah, but we love this location, and this house has character!”

Tutu was right! It seems like every stinkin’ week lately I’m tossing money into the black hole of charm. DJ’s shower cost $310 to fix! I put it off, the teeny drip, until it eventually mirrored Niagara Falls even though the handle was fully turned off.

And now my air conditioner is on the fritz. That ought to be an easy $7,000 fix!

I bet in 1955 they didn’t have to worry about that, cause there was no a/c back then.  My spoiled kids.   I told them we were going to spend the summer pretending we lived in the 50’s, like in the movie Grease.

“It’s gonna be fun!  Grandma’s making you a Poodle Skirt, and I bought a big jar of vaseline to slick my hair back!  Oh, and no air conditioning…”

You’d have thought I told them we were spending the summer camping in Death Valley.

As if the air conditioning wasn’t enough, two weeks ago when we had a torrential downpour, water was flowing through the roof. Just dribbling in like a fountain. It ruined a rug and bits of the ceiling, on the first and second floors, are now crumbling onto the floor.

Your ceiling on your floor is NOT a good thing.

I climbed my non-handy-man, scared of heights behind up on the top of my house to see if I could figure out where the water might be coming from. It wasn’t difficult to find the hole. There was a 2 foot by 2 foot shingleless circle dug out right above the indoor rain spot.

After consulting with my buddy, a roofer, it was determined that the likely culprit was a raccoon.

I’d always wondered what Jethro Bodine from The Beverly Hillbillies was referring to when he used the word varmint. Now I know.

My buddy fixed my roof, and I have the rug ready to go to the heavy-duty rug cleaner shop because the $99 I spent on Stanley Steamer was like wiping a paper towel across a nuclear spill. It did nothing.

Five days after the roof was fixed, it rained again. And guess what? It leaked again. So, I climbed back out of the window and shimmied back up the roof, and burned the hell out of the palms of my hands because shingles are 320 degrees Celsius at 4PM in North Carolina in the summer. And guess what? The damn varmint had revisited, digging another hole in the lid of my house.

I HATE THIS ANIMAL. I am not a violent person, but the fantasies I’ve had about how I could hurt this creature are disturbing. PETA could press charges simply for my thoughts.

Now, I’ve paid critter control to come out and set a trap on top of my house to try to capture this evil monster.

Why does he want to come in my house? Is it my cooking?

By the time it’s all said and done, I will have spent over a thousand dollars simply because Ricky Raccoon has a shingles fetish.

If Critter Boy can’t catch him, I’m buying a shotgun and night vision goggles. I’m getting his ass, one way or another.

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Posted by Danny Tanner on July 2, 2014

https://therealfullhouse.wordpress.com/2014/07/02/ricky-raccoon/