Greetings from Racoonland

Hi all,

Great to hear from so many of you. I am just back from (now don't get jealous) a great trip with the family to Kansas and Iowa (and Illinois and Indiana but we go there frequently). Had a great time and my three girls were incredible travelers. Here's proof: Mira, my 7 year old, asks yesterday morning, "Dad, how long to Philadelphia?" I tell her 5 hours. She turns to her sisters and says, "Grace, Ruby, it's only 5 hours today!"

I had one night at home after our lovely time together before a 7 AM cab picked me up to catch a flight to the airport. Obviously, living in Philly meant I had perhaps the shortest ride home and, indeed, that was uneventful. I made up for it by coming home, going out with a friend for dinner and a movie, coming back to my house, going up to my bedroom, turning on the light and seeing a racoon climbing up our clothes hamper. It stopped, I stopped, I mumbled several expletives and promptly lost any breathing techniques or akido knowledge I had gleaned, backed out and got some have-a-heart traps from the roof. Set them up in my bedroom and went to another room to try to sleep. 4 AM, snap, I go down and there's the little bugger in the trap, scared and quiet. I actually felt some pity, started to speak softly and gently to it now that I was in a superior position, breathed well, did some akido transferrence of racoon energy, and then saw a movement out of the corner of my eye. There was another little bugger looking at me, slowly climbing up the molding around my window. Bye, bye, breathing and akido.

Anyway, they were both caught and there appear to be no more. I'm sure that's more than most of you wanted to know. . . .

I grabbed my most recent New Yorker before I left for Kansas (I love saying that as it makes me sound so cultured. . . the New Yorker part, not necessarily the Kansas part). It has a great one-pager piece by Jack Handey called "My Nature Documentary" in which he describes a nature documentary he is planning that involves a monkey and a giraffe. It's funny, but had me laughing out loud on my porch swing at 5 AM after I encountered the racoons because it reminded me so much of Whiplash, the Rodeo Monkey. If any of you would like a copy, let me know. I plan to sent one to Scott, for sure, who shared the story of Whiplash and had our dinner table feeling some pity for poor Whiplash while we laughed our heads off.

Wonderful to have this blog and thanks to Oman for setting it up. I look forward to keeping in touch.

Jim