Okay, so this morning, around 3:30am, I got a bit of a surprise. I woke up to Chris turning off the fan in our bedroom (this is a constant battle with us - I like it on, he likes it off!), and I figured he was trying to be sneaky by turning it off when he thought I was sleeping.
I sleepily asked him what he was doing and he responded, "I need you to get up quietly."
{ Let me back up slightly to explain that Chris sometimes takes sleeping tablets on occasion due to insomnia. Well, he took one last night and sometimes they make him a little loopy if he stays up and tries to chat after he has taken it. This usually offers some good laughs in the process. So I figured the following conversation was just loopy, drug-induced nonsense and was trying my best to ignore it and fall back to sleep. }
I ignored his request for me to 'get up quietly,' and repeated my question, "what are you doing?"
"I might have to go up on the roof." Followed by him walking to the corner of our bedroom and kneeling down to peek under the blinds of our window.
"Okay, crazy, you took a sleeping pill last night remember? " Followed by me making a concerted effort not to fall back to sleep in case he really did make it up onto the roof, knowing that could be all kinds of dangerous.
"Sarah, there is someone, or something up on the roof. Listen."
I will admit that even this didn't make me snap to attention because I really did think Chris had lost his mind. So I just closed my eyes and pretended this wasn't happening, willing myself to fall back to sleep.
Finally, Chris stood dead still in our room and it was then that I heard it, too: heavy, creaky steps moving around above our (2nd floor!) bedroom.
And just like that, I was awake and alert. Chris wasn't crazy, there really was something on our roof, and it sounded way too heavy to be an animal.
"Chris, what do we do?"
"Come on, let's get out to the car." So I followed my baseball-bat-carrying husband down the stairs ever so quietly, so as not to disturb the axe murderer on our roof.
"Should we call 9-1-1?" Chris innocently suggested.
It wasn't until we pulled out of the drive to get a better vantage point of the roof (hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time), that we noticed our law enforcement neighbor's garage door was open. At 3:30am. VERY suspicious. Now we were really worried.
"Okay," I agreed, "let's call 9-1-1."
I am pleased to report that the local police arrived within about 2 minutes of us placing the call, and it must have been a slow night because before we knew it, three patrol cars were creeping up the cul-de-sac with their lights off. One of them hopped out of the car and started off towards our side gate, where the friendly neighborhood cat, Louie, greeted him in true Louie fashion. (despite our fears, this made us laugh, because this cat is literally everywhere!)
A few minutes later, the officer came over to our car and told us the news.
"You have a hole on the back of your house where the wall meets the roof, and I think you have a raccoon in your attic."
A hole? What? We haven't noticed anything! How could we have missed it?
{ what raccoons look like in Chris' imagintion. }
We waited for a few minutes while the other officer attempted to wake our law enforcement neighbor to make sure everything was okay. When we got the green light, he walked us around to the rear of the house and pointed out the hole. It appears to be the place that the attic gets ventilated (do attics get ventilated? I have no idea... but that's what it looks like..). It appears as though said raccoon pried it open to get inside.
{ what raccoons look like in my imagination. }
My question... how in the world did the raccoon get all the way up there? Those things are like ninjas!
{ did it climb the gutter up, or simply scale the side of our house? }
Looks like it's going to be a coffee day, as I was unsuccessful at falling back to sleep after all of this excitement.
Hopefully we can get rid of this sucker later today, because... what's the saying? Three's a crowd, raccoon. Three's a crowd.
