My neighbor stopped me coming out of the house the other day.



As you may or may not know, I'm a night person most times. I often will be up all night working on something. If a pack of crazed viscous possums led by William Shatner were causing a ruckus in my back yard... I would hear about it. The other thing is... how does she know they live in my back yard?

I see freaking possums EVERYWHERE in my area. They roam the whole neighborhood late at night. Walking the streets like mutant rats. Freakish pests. But they don't really hurt anyone. As far as beasts go they are very quiet (unlike the 50 bazilliion tom cats that "mark their territory" in my back yard. Or my neighbors Rat Dog® that yaps it's head off so frantically I worry it's head will just explode from the strain... actually I HOPE it's head will explode from the strain.

I've decided there isn't much I can do about the possums. If they live back there... I can't find them during the day, and I've watched way too many horror movies to go poking around in the dark corners of my back yard at night... <shiver>.... gives me freaking nightmares. I can just hear the shrill music of my life's internal soundtrack as I disturb the pack of undead possums and they all attack me as I scream in horror.

I am also protected by the law. Technically a possum is a wild animal. It isn't my responsibility to get rid of them if they are bothering my nasty mean neighbor... especially if they are bothering my nasty mean neighbor with her freakish bug eyed dog that runs back and forth through her house all day barking at the wind... the mailman... kids playing in the street... my flushing toilet... <sigh>.

I asked her again about the possums the other day. She was out with her... rat-dog hybrid telling it to shut up as if it had a brain large enough to even understand. Over the incessant noise I asked her how she knew the possums lived in my yard.



I don't get it. Her yard is fenced in. So if they get into her yard... that's her problem right? She should leave her rat-dog out there to scare them off. Of course most likely the possums would just eat the dog... I wish the possums would eat the dog.

Keep in mind this is a woman who threatened to sue someone two houses down because their tree dropped leaves and those helicopter seeds into her gutters... seriously... she was going to sue them for damages to her house... two houses away. Unless that tree learned how to use quantum physics and string theory to teleport it's leaves and seeds onto the roof of her house... it is very unlikely she had much of a case. The neighbor with the tree has since moved. It was going to cost several thousand dollars for a tree guy to come out and trim the tree. So he figured it was time to move I guess.

I honestly believe that she saw possums on her porch ONCE. They freaked her out, she hit them with the flashlight and they took off. She has blown this up in her mind into a pack of possums that use my yard as their headquarters to plan the nightly raids into her yard.

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I think I may have inherited this "live and let live" with wild life from my father. At my parents house, they had a bad ant infestation. I located the nest and suggested they get some of those poison spikes and wipe them out. My father disagreed.



-vern

Gotta love neighbors! Could be worse.. Could be Raccoons.. That is a scary animal.. Get a couple of them fighting and the noise makes it 10x worse.

If they are going through a hole in HER fence.. heck yeah.. SHE should fix it.. oh.. and:



I had an entire tree cut down and removed for $300. Just make sure they don't get seeds on her driveway.. I can't image the damage that would do.

Speaking of raccoons...

My aunt and uncle some years back bought a new house. The former owner casual mentioned after all the paperwork was signed and everything done, that...

... she fed the raccoons every night.

My uncle goes out that first night to feed the beasts... He stopped counting after 16 showed up. He finally gave up, ran screaming into the house and locked the door. He cut those guys off cold turkey. They weren't happy. When I heard this story it reminded me of that movie "Signs" when the family is trapped in the basement of their house at night while aliens trash the place.

Can you imagine a pack of 20 or so angry, hungry raccoons trying to break in to your house? They have opposable thumbs for crying out loud! They could drive a car if they put their minds to it (or fire a gun!).

Some friends and I had a pet raccoon when I was a kid. It could open doors, open cupboards, open the fridge, look for the stuff it liked. It was like some deadbeat relative who moves in to your home for a few days and eats all of your food and craps on the floor.

-vern

We had a possum living in our lounge room in the pot-bellied stove until this winter hit (I'm Down Under), and it wasn't until we went to light the second fire and saw a large eye looking back at us through the glass that we knew about it. We had just assumed the mess had been left from the previous winter. I don't know what he thought when he came back and found his house was on fire.

One night I heard a persistent rustling in a tree on the side of my house. I went over expecting to see my cat, but I shine my flashlight up and see this large white round thing about the size of a basket ball peering back at me with those glowing eyes they have. That was a possum. Very primitive creatures.

Another night I was up in my room and hear loud glass breaking. I rush downstairs, I figure it's zombies trying to get in again but no, it's raccoons on the fireplace mantle knocking vases to the floor. They'd snuck in thru the pet port in the back door.

I also had raccoons in the attic. They'd come down at night and steal dog food. For a while the cat would sit inside the door and swat their noses as they poked thru the door but she gave up on that after a while. Difficult to get rid of them.

I find geckos on my walls too.

We didn't have this sort of thing when I was growing up in Minnesota. We'd find salamanders in window wells now and then and occasionally you'd hear that a deer had lept thru someone's picture window, but that was it.



My boyfriend's 98 year-old grandmother had been feeding cats off her back porch in west texas for years when we went to visit. It was a sea of cats. I have never seen so many cats in one place. It was like that EDS "herding cats" commercial. All of them weird looking (inbreeding i guess) and none of them friendly.

I suppose they smelled bad too, but grandma's eight pack a day chain-smoking habit pretty much overpowered the urine and feces. Then her 92 year old brother and his wife would come over and light up too. Just recalling it makes my eyes burn. I don't know how they did not burn that house down. The furniture all looked like it had been riddled with machine gun fire, but it was really cigarette burns.

That trip is on my top-10 list of miserable vacations.

One day, at band camp, I mean when I was young...My cat and dog ganged up and fought and killed an opossum (strange to watch a cat and dog work together). Of course, I picked it up by its tail and examined the thing head to toe for quite a while. They are weird looking creatures. Then I swung it by its tail and threw it into the woods down a gully. It landed and ran away. Acting! And boy was I glad he was conditioned to act dead rather than attack.

I had a family of raccoons spend the winter in my boat. In spring, I walked by the boat and heard scratching inside... so I yanked off the cover and to my horror, there was feces everywhere, the seats were all ripped up, steering wheel bitten, carpet torn-up, urine. They were in the anchor-box at the nose of the boat, which was high in the air for drainage. I climbed up there, took off the cover and saw a little Disney scene...Mom, Dad and 4 little babies breast feeding. Mom and Dad quickly bolted under the seats of the open bow boat and were gone. I was FURIOUS... I grabbed the babies by the 'scruff-o-the-neck and thru them down hard to the pavement below, then went looking for a shovel to finish them off when a neighbor boy rode up on a bicycle... 'Matt- What are you doing?' he asked.

'I'm killing these raccoons...they wrecked my boat! Go away, you don't want to see this...' I replied.
'You shouldn't do that- it's cruel.' he whined, then continued 'My daddy uses traps to catch raccoons. He just caught 2 a month ago.'

'Really?' I thought about asking to borrow the traps, then asked the next logical question...'What did he do with them once he trapped them?'

'Oh- he brought them down here by your house and let them go...'

GRRRRRR. A humane way to see them go is to place a boom box radio near they're nest and set it on LOUD rock-N-roll... preferably Ted Nugent. Also, spray ammonia all over the place to discourage their return. Fix that hole in the fence. Keep a shovel handy in case you encounter them, then 'whack-em-and-stack-em'.

Yikes! That last post should have had an "R" rating for Graphic Violence.

I feel bad when I stomp on ants, and of course then I immediately pray for forgiveness... Stomp, pray, stomp, pray, stomp, pray...etc

I've had raccoons break into my house...they opened a sliding glass door and headed straight for the cat food & water...what a mess. They even played with some stuffed toys.

I actually love seeing them and the possums and yes, even the skunks in my backyard.

Don't get me wrong... I think they are cute and cuddly- dead or alive!

The raccoon my friends and I raised when we were kids was found abandoned in the woods behind our houses. The thing was half way up a tree for several days making sad noises. Finally we decided it was going to just starve to death so we adopted it... we had to climb the tree first... that's another story.

His name was Zeek. We built him a little house with his name on it.

Raccoons are INCREDIBLY intelligent. We're talking like... almost primate like intelligence (my observation, not based on science ) As a youngster he was completely tame and followed the 4 or 5 of us kids EVERYWHERE. He was a part of our gang. He was our mascot for that summer. He was never mean or bit or did anything but explore EVERYTHING. He needed to look at everything. We didn't have to call to him, or make sure it was with us. Zeek was just always there... like an annoying tag along sibling. His curiosity was fascinating.

We tried to catch as much "natural" food for him as we could. (he did steal people food on his own which was... more often then our parents preferred). As I recall we were trying to teach him how to hunt and find it's own food (we knew they get vicious when they grow up). We would take him down to the ponds and stream and catch tadpoles for him by scooping them out of the water with our hands. (he LOVED those big fat bull frog tadpoles.)

Of course Zeek was a wild animal and by the end of the summer the honeymoon was over. He was living totally on its own resources by then and spent more time in the wild than with us. He would vanish for days at a time and we thought he was gone... then he would show up again and we would get calls from the neighbors about the raccoon at their door looking for handouts (or on their patio destroying the lawn furniture).

Finally one of the fathers packed us all in the car, drove out to a remote wooded area and let it go. Zeek didn't want to leave, we had to yell and scream and honk the horn and rev the engine to chase him off (there may have been a few "illegal" fireworks involved).

We were not sad... by that time he was more of a nuisance than a pet. My brother and I left him in the house one night and he climbed up the handles of the draws in the kitchen, opened the cupboard door and started to go through the cans and boxes looking for something good to eat.

They act like little people. It's those hands. It makes them look so human. I could almost imagine him thinking to itself "what am I hungry for?" as he stood on his hind legs holding the cupboard open studying the options. He even managed to open the fridge and CLIMBED IN to look for food... obviously our parents were not home at the time.

Raccoons are dangerous. They are pests. But for one long summer when I was young a baby raccoon became a ten year old kid... until it became a vicious annoying dangerous pest that ripped through screen doors.

-vern

Robcat, you know very well we do have dangerous ten-pound animals in Minnesota.

They're called mosquitos.

Um....we....get....snails over here. They're freaky mutant slugs. I really feel guilty when I half step on one. Should I finish the job and put it out of pain? Such dilemmas.

I remember reading an article for catching and preparing snails and slugs for good eats.

You put beer in an open container outside. The next day you take all the slugs and snails and put them in cornmeal (still alive. This is not "breading"). Leave them in the cornmeal for a while. They eat this which cleans out their digestive system (this works for earthworms too I think).

Then cook 'em up and enjoy.

p.s. We've got a food crisis people! Pretty soon you will be fighting over Vern's Deep Fried Slugs®

-vern

Don't forget to serve it up with the remainder of the snail flavored and slug infused beer.

Viscous opossums are okay. I can deal with the oozy ones.
It's the vicious ones that bother me... Especially when they gamble and patronize ladies of the evening?!... To think, I once bought a vicious can-opener and I never knew till now!!

Dang, Vern, that raccoon story would make a great kids movie!

When I was young, my family rented a cottage associated with the Mount Philo Inn in Vermont. Mount Philo itself overlooks Lake Champlain and is a state park. The local matriarch of the racoon population in the park was known as "The Tupperware Lady". She learned to recognize Tupperware and that it usually contained good things to eat. The park rangers found her den, crammed full of empty Tupperware containers! Since we actually lived on Mt. Philo we frequented the park and got to know The Tupperware Lady--the largest, fattest wild racoon I have ever seen...gelatinous almost! But very much in charge of things!

I have not encountered any "viscous" opossums, though. We do have quite a population of regular possums in my neighborhood here in Georgia. Generally they mind their own business, though. They don't keep us up at night drinking cheap beer and playing loud music, like our human neighbors occasionally do, though technically, if possums did have a party I guess it would be a "wild" party.

Sounds like you might be better off if the possums were your next door neighbors.

Possums are kind of "viscous" if you turn them over on their backs.

It's not my fault. Stupid spell checker.


-vern
-tern
-fern
-bern

(just making sure I spell "vern" right).

Non-viscous oppossums:

Opie

The wilder variety...

They're sooooo cute! How could anyone hate something sooooo cute. Even that big one with the teeth!

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I've killed my back yard. It is dead. I've poisoned it at the request of my town CODE ENFORCEMENT OFFICER, otherwise known as the ELSMERE GESTAPO. He told me... opossums could live in the ivy... yeah right. I sprayed the poison very liberally around the FENCE to prevent ivy from growing up it and possibly hiding ELEPHANTS or viscous SEA LIONS. KING COBRAS are known to hide in english ivy and pounce on children as they walk by. I asked my CODE ENFORCEMNT OFFICER about the potential of injuring my neighbors dog with the poison...



Seriously though. My town CODE ENFORCEMENT officer told me that the neighbors are complaining about the opossums as if I am raising them on some kind of illegal opossum farm. About a year ago my neighbor was raising pit bulls for dog fights in the downtown area... I am sure of this... I complained about the constant barking and two or three DIFFERENT huge pit bulls on any given day in a tiny backyard, unattended for hours at a time... nothing. They did nothing. Now, I have completely SILENT AND INVISIBLE opossums that come out only at night and are very quiet... and I get calls and complaints up the wazoo.

My township passed a new law. INSTANT TICKETING. If a member of the ELSMERE GESTAPO believes anyone has violated the ARBITRARY MESSY YARD LAW they can instantly give you a ticket for $100 without any warning. On a whim. Entirely up to the discretion of the CODE ENFORCEMENT AGENT. Not taking any chances. I sprayed weed killer over the whole yard. It is brown and dead. Nothing alive can hide in that yard. Try and fine me now ELSMERE GESTAPO.... just try it. Next step... kill the front yard... cover it with gravel. They WILL give me a ticket. I have no idea when they check the yards. Apparently they measure the height, they take photos (before or after I cut my grass? they won't tell me.). Funny thing... I've been checking on some of my neighbors yards to compare them to mine. Interestingly they aren't much different. Several of my neighbors have farms... literally. I saw a front yard completely covered with huge corn stalks, tomatoes, melons, zucchini. Totally overgrown... yet... no one complains about them. That's where the dang opossums come from. I think they are producing illegal ethanol and burning it in their car. Did you know burning 100% ethanol in your car is a federal crime? I didn't know that.

-vern

Course now you realize that its going to turn into mud- and that its probably going to become a swamp at the first heavy rainfall you get. I cant see the neighbors dog surviving long with the alligators you're going to get, Still, she shouldn't complain about the possums in the Ivy.

My neighbor poisoned all the ivy in her hedge, it was killing her privet -now she has a wonderful hedge. The ivy was the only thing growing on my side, so we HAD a wonderful hedge, now we just have dead sticks. I guess one mans gain, etc

Chris

Mud and rain will be no problem. I need to wash away the poison so I can start growing corn to make ethanol to burn in my car... mixed with gasoline of course (they are listening).

I know about the "sticks". My whole backyard is a complex web of interconnected dead, dried sticks. My biggest headache now is the fairly large dead tree that was completely engulfed and MURDERED by the ivy. It all hasn't died yet... the ivy is so thick I can't see the tree. It's a big green lumpy protrusion, about 15 feet high. I am waiting for that ivy to die so I can see the best way to cut it down.

-vern

This stuff is ridiculous.. I've told my wife a hundred times that our neighbors better be careful. If they tick me off, it'll be 100 times worse for them, as I'm sure they break a lot more laws then I do.. and the next time someone tells me I need to move or fix or cut or anything on my property, I'll be the worst neighbor on the block. The police station (or whoever you report crap to) will know me on a first name bases as I call in daily violations on my block.

Sure, ELSMERE GESTAPO is just doing his job.. but come on. You need to find out were he lives, and make sure he's up to code. Take a half day off from work and research all the codes. Then apply them all to everyone. If they don't do anything about it after one call.. see what they do after the 10th call.. if still nothing, what about the 100th call. If still nothing, go up the chain. They also have to report to someone.. Let them know that you don't feel your ELSMERE GESTAPO is doing their job.

If you run a red light there is no "gray" area. There is no room for personal judgment. You go through a red light it is a black and white result. Either the light was red and you kept going or it wasn't. It doesn't matter if someone else earlier ran the light and didn't get caught, you ran the light you get a ticket. This new "instant ticketing" for "how pretty is my yard" has too much personal interpretation. The code enforcement officer makes a personal judgement. The law is so vague and unclear that ANYONE can violate it. It is only up to the officer to decide who to pick on.

There is a LAW here that I can't put my garbage cans out on the street before 6pm the night before the pick up. I also can't leave my empty cans anywhere in the front of my house EVER. I live in a row house. I have to drag my garbage half way down the street through a dirty muddy, weedy drainage ditch behind all the houses to take my garbage to the curb. Dogs barking, weeds, poison ivy. I should be able to leave my cans out front and drop the garbage in during the week. Airtight sealed plastic cans, no smell, no mess. Not ugly. Green cans that blend in to the environment. No. I have to keep my garbage somewhere in my small row house ALL week. Wait until 5:59 pm and drag it around the back of the house.

They also have legalized extortion in my town. If you want to put a small shed in your back yard you have to apply for a "code variance". This costs $200. Sheds are prohibited by town code. That's right, you can't put up a tool or storage shed on your own property. It's illegal. Yet, nearly everyone has one. Just go to the court building, ask for the "code variance" paperwork, pay the $200 fee and you can put up a shed. This is just legalized bribery. It probably started years ago. Slip the guy $50 bucks and you get "authorized" to put in a shed. Eventually they must have caught on to this and made it "official" so they could charge a standard fee and make it part of the town budget.

My old neighbor found out about this when he wanted to park his Harley in the back yard during the summer. He wanted to put up a small shed to protect it. No go. He refused to pay so he just laid a heavy tarp over the bike like he had been doing for years. Unfortunately they found out he wanted a shed but wouldn't pay for it and started hassling him for "improper storage of a vehicle".

Did I mention our mayor a few years back got really drunk at the town festival and groped one of his female constituents? It was in the paper. Very embarrassing. This is as close to Mayberry I will ever get. It's like Twin Peaks without the creepy music (unless you drive by my house when I have the stereo up really loud. Funny that. No complaints ever about noise. Maybe the music is making the ivy grow faster.)

-vern

Wow.. sounds like it is time to move.. Stop giving them your tax money.