Battling the Raccoons
I want very much to be posting more on this blog, but I’m not a very good raccoon.
Some of the biggest and meanest raccoons in the world live in my garage. To be more accurate, they don’t actually live in the garage. They live in the walls of it. In a baffling fit of throwing good money after bad, the previous owners of my house decided to cover the wooden walls of the detached garage with vinyl siding. The raccoons, not to be put off by the depressing gray shade of the siding, found that they could burrow between the siding and the wooden walls, creating a nice, cozy abode for themselves. So far as I can tell, they only emerge from their comfortable subsidized housing to prowl the neighbourhood for tasty food waste.
Since Toronto has a municipal food waste collection program, almost every house in my neighbourhood has a green bin somewhere outside the house, expressly designed for food and organic waste –which includes diapers, by the way, in my house and many of those around me. And the raccoons love nothing better than to make sport of trying to pry them open. The latches on the green bins were not in any way designed to defeat raccoons, and those who fail to attach an aftermarket strap or lock run the risk of seeing a week’s worth of rotten veggies and meat scraps on the driveway in the morning. Like most people, I learned this the hard way.
So you’ll appreciate that I am no fan of raccoons. But the biggest raccoon of all lives right in my house, and he is me.
