Often, I’m like: “I’ve got nothing to say.”

The advertising was due a day early because of the New Year so not surprisingly I did the ads early. When I got back home, I heard the tenant call out: “Hello?” It really was more of a question than an exclamation or just a regular statement. I answered likewise only mine wasn’t a question. She was outside an unused room of mine that’s opposite the washer and dryer. She has permission to use my washer and/or dyer because I’m a nice guy but I wondered why she was there.

“Umm, there’s a raccoon up here. A rather big one,” is how she continued. I walked up the stairs and looked into the room, there’s no electricity hooked up in that room because I haven’t finished wiring it yet. All I have to do is wiring a cable into a junction box in the basement but it never seems to make it to the top of my to-do list. One of the things that did make it to the to-do list was sticking insulation in over the ceiling of this vacant room which necessitated removing some of the ceiling, so there is whole the length of the room and the width of between two joists.

I couldn’t see anything in the darkened room, so I fetched the flashlight that I keep by my TV. The room isn’t exactly unused because I have it cluttered with tools and extra building materials. So finding him wasn’t as simple as looking in an empty room but sure enough, there was indeed a raccoon in the room and he must have been the shy variety because when I shined the light on him he climbed up the wide window trim. I assumed he was trying to get back out the same way he fell in but he couldn’t quite reach.

Next to the window were some 2 by 4’s and some of the 2x4’s were actually 2x6’s and 2x8’s; he tried to use these as well to get back to the hole in the ceiling but they weren’t angled the right way. He certainly seemed like he didn’t want to be in my living space but he was uncertain as to how to get the hell out of my living space. I left the room and barricaded one flight of stairs with a piece of sheetrock and used two folding chairs and a four foot laddered placed on its side to discourage him from running anywhere else in the house. I then opened the door that leads to the roof of the first floor addition.

I returned to the room and the critter was still hanging on to the top of some 2x4’s so I started removing them one by one. He didn’t like that so much but he was a good sport about it. He didn’t get angry, he just tried to grab onto the next length of wood, sometimes knocking them over. I finally got him down to one piece of wood which I slowly lowered to the floor. Once he was level with the floor he ran out of the room and out the opened door, pretty much just like I had planned. I then restacked the wood and cooked a steakum.