11:20 p.m. - 2004-03-18
animal farm
So, tonight, I went out with Andrea and KC and Bethany to celebrate Andrea's birthday. I stopped at the grocery store on teh way home, and as has been the case lately, had to park a few blocks from my house. SO, as I am walking to my place, with groceries in hand, I see up ahead what appears to be a medium sized dog, wandering around. As I approach, and am in my strange way of talking to animals as though they are humans "hmm, where's your house doggie...you shouldn't be wandering-oh my word! You're not a dog!" It was a VERY large raccoon. And it has turned and started LUMBERING toward me. I stomp my feet and make noise to scare it away, and it stand up on it's hind legs, makes creepy clicking sounds at me, sways back and forth a few times and basically CHARGES straight at me. In characteristic form, I scream like a school girl and bolt down the street as fast as I can. I realize suddenly how this must look to any potential spectators: a grown woman, running (and half panicked) from a woodland creature in a well lit, residential neighborhood carrying three bags of groceries, my gym bag and my purse in well-heeled "clip clop-clip clop" shoes at 11 o'clock at night. And the really disturbing thing is that this does not strike me as particularly unusual, considering the previous incidents at my last place of residence that involved a night-wandering rotweiller, large adventurous spiders in my bathroom, cats that followed me, uninvited, into the house and the irish setter that once jumped into my car in the middle of the night in Athens while I was trying to get into it. I am in need of some sort of stray animal emergency management training.
