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The Raccoon Whisperer

Last week, I wrote about the raccoon who took up residence in a tree stump in my backyard. I came up with several theories to explain its presence there. He may have been:

  1. rabid,
  2. the reincarnation of Abin Sur,
  3. a MOVE-like squatter, or
  4. the victim of a Nigerian time-share scam.

The animal’s sluggishness and lack of response to having a rock tossed into its nest left me to conclude that it was dying. However, as one of my coworkers pointed out, the raccoon probably took up residence because it needed somewhere to birth its babies. It’s that time of year for them. I guess there’s some sort of symbolism in my seeing decay and death while other people see life, but maybe that’s just my zombie-fixation showing.

So on Monday evening I called the local animal hospital to find out the protocol for dealing with this guy, and that led me on the merry chase of calling the police’s non-emergency line, then the animal control facility in a nearby town, and ultimately The Wildlife Rehabilitator.

TWR, who lives in my town, confirmed the likelihood of my coworker’s prognosis on Tuesday morning: Raccquel Raccoon was likely getting ready to spawn little raccoon kids. “So, um, what do we do about that? Because I’m really not ready to start a family. I mean, I just got a dog!”

She told me that her daughter, who handles varmint-evictions, would call and check out the scene in the stump. She said, “She used to handle animal control in the town, until the other party took over after the election. They fired her after 8 years. And she’d done a great job. She was even working with the Mine People [a.k.a. the Jackson-Whites] on a spay/neuter program!”

“She was gonna spay and neuter the Jackson-Whites? That is AWESOME!”

“. . . Anyway, the fee to remove a raccoon is $175. But if she has babies, then it’s $225, because we have to house them together while they’re rehabilitated.”

“House them? Seriously? I was figuring I’d have to pay you for a burlap sack, some bricks and a length of twine.”

“Sir?”

“Well, it’s not like raccoons are an endangered species or something. . .”

“We take our job very seriously! These animals need to be rehabilitated before we let them out in the wild.”

Great: now I was stuck envisioning this raccoon in a group session at a rehab clinic with Britney, Lindsay and Amy Winehouse. I thought about sparing Raccquel that fate by borrowing one of dad’s rifles and drilling her. Then I thought about the possibility of a ricocheting bullet catching me in the throat and killing me, and how people would laugh because I was too cheap to call in The Wildlife Rehabilitator and her daughter, The Raccoon Whisperer, to take care of things. [Note: Of course, when I told Dad about this situation, he volunteered to come over and shoot Raccquel. I still would’ve ended up getting hit by a ricochet.]

I told her to go ahead and set it up. She didn’t call back for the rest of the week, so I started thinking of what amount of Kevlar I’d need to wear to feel safe. Then I thought about calling in a stump-grinder to take care of Raccquel’s home, without telling him that the raccoon was living there. Then I thought about the premise of Bosom Buddies and feared that Raccquel would take up residence in my attic or boiler room, dressed in drag.

With enough other stuff going on at work, I was able to put off thinking too much about the situation. Friday morning, TWR called to say that she and TRW were in my neighborhood, and would check out the situation with Raccquel. I was convinced that they took a few extra days in hopes that she’d have given birth, earning themselves an extra $50. It was to no avail. They called, live from the stump, to tell me that Raccquel was there, alone, and that they’d get her out that morning.

“I forgot to mention; watch out for the dog-crap. That’s how Rufus & I discovered this whole thing, after all.”

When I got home that night, there was no sign of my tenant in the tree stump, nor any struggle and zombified animal control staff, so I figure that things went smoothly, and Raccquel was safely in rehab, learning that opening people’s trash cans is just a cry for help.

Au revoir, raton laveur!

* * *

Coda: Friday evening, I took Rufus out for his bathroom break, and noticed a policeman walking in the woods behind my neighbor’s house (and mine).

“What’s going on, officer?” I called out.

He looked up, saw me, and said, “Get your dog inside! There’s a bear somewhere down the hill!”

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Head, meet wall

John Crudele, the very good business columnist at the NYPost, regularly warns us to take the Labor Department’s monthly employment figures with a grain of salt; the birth/death model they employ can fudge a lot of employment stats.

The numbers that came out today are pretty depressing — a loss of 80,000 jobs, and a revised estimate of increased job losses in January and February — but Crudele points out that the April figures (to be released May 2) tend to be twice as “generous” with the number of new jobs that Labor thinks were created, but can’t prove. So we’ll probably see uninformed commentary about how the economy is turning around, about one month from today.

This NYTimes article on the unemployment report isn’t as entertaining as Crudele’s writing, although it does point out that Hillary Clinton “referred to herself as a ‘Paulette Revere’ whose calls for financial assistance have gone unheeded.”

After some harrowing stories of industrial regions that have seen tremendous job losses, the article concludes with this anecdote:

The downturn has even come to San Francisco, where highly trained workers with elite degrees flock to work for some of the world’s biggest technology companies. CNet Networks, the online media giant, laid off 10 percent of its staff — about 120 workers — this year in an effort to increase profitability and its share price. Yahoo, the search engine company, said it would cut its work force by 1,000.

Until recently, Parul Vora, 28, was earning a six-figure salary as part of an elite research team at Yahoo. Ms. Vora, who has a master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lost her job in early February.

“I had never been laid off and never imagined being laid off,” Ms. Vora said. “I was sad personally and professionally.”

But Ms. Vora has better prospects than most. She said she has already been wooed by several potential employers.

“There are a lot of jobs out there, but I’m pretty picky,” Ms. Vora said. “My biggest worry is finding a new job I like.”

Seriously: that’s the end of the article. See, the times are tough for everyone, even a 28-year-old MIT post-grad who lives in the most expensive city in the country and who counts as unemployed, but is lining up job offers and doesn’t know which one to take.

I guess they’re writing to their demographic or something.

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Amazon Sightings

As part of my morning web-trawl, I check Amazon to see if they have any good daily specials; I’ve found some neat buys that way. Today’s is not one of them:

I guess that’s a step up from this odd attempt at selling Vista Service Pack 1:

“more fun”?

It almost makes me want to buy the new album from Madonna Jessica Parker!

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Wanna see my pot of gold?

Last week at the conference in Philadelphia, one of my advertisers stopped by our booth and asked me to come by to answer a question his coworkers had. Their company is based in a small city.

One said, “On the way to dinner last night, we noticed that some of the street signs are made with rainbow symbols on them. Why is that?”

I looked at them puzzledly. “Seriously?” I asked.

They stared at me. “Yeah,” one said.

“It’s, uh, it’s the gay district,” I said.

“THANK YOU!” one said. “I told you guys! It’s like they’ve never been to a big city before,” he added.

I said, “You’ve never seen that? Rainbow flags? Storefronts with pretty colors? Guys who are much better looking than any guy you’ve ever met?”

“Seriously?” another asked. “Why do you know that?”

“Because . . . I’m aware of cultural symbols and I have lots of queer friends . . .?”

Walking back to my booth shaking my head, I muttered, “What did they think, it was the leprechaun district?”

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Writing and Blogging

The NY Observer has a funny article about how there’s no “career path” for writers nowadays, because they can’t work their way up from magazines into high-paying jobs as ‘intelligentsia’ or something, the way they once could. Oh, and writers can’t get expense accounts anymore. I was entertained by its clueless aspiration for a world almost 50 years gone. Or, as this commenter put it:

This reads like a bunch of bitter, entitled, anonymous people trying to rationalize their failures in a piece that is itself a rationalization of its own failures. If there were any numbers or statistics even remotely associated with this bogus trend piece it might be worth discussing, but it’s just empty and lazy.

Anyway, here’s a piece from Donald Pittenger on the use(lessness) of editors, which parallels the Observer article in a neat way. At least, I think it does, but I got no sleep last night, so I may be clutching at straws.

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Hot Chip

Happy birthday / April Fool’s day to Chip Delany! Thank you for keeping faith in my abilities as a publisher, long after a sensible man would have given up.

Samuel R. Delany and Dennis