The Unwelcome Masked Visitor

About a week ago, my oldest daughter went out to the car to grab her bag she had left the night before.  As she got closer to the car she observed the dogs barker fervently at the underside of my tiny red Volkswagen Beetle.  Our dogs frequently corner and bark incessantly at frogs so she just thought that they had trapped one more frog and weren't able to reach it to torture it.  She bent down on the knees to peer under the car to rescue the poor frog.  As soon as she ducked her head lower than the bottom of the car she was greeted with a hissing, growling raccoon.  She screamed, jumped up as quickly as she could and in her rendition of the story, leaped from the top of our staircase ALL THE WAY to the bottom to tell my husband, Bud.

Bud does not get typically overly excited about anything and being raised on a farm, animals, even the wild kind, don't tend to excite him, unlike my 13 year city slicker who has just seen her very first wild animal!  Bud slowly puts on his slippers, one at a time and casually saunters up the staircase behind Olivia who has once again defied all laws of gravity and managed to bound up the stairs while only touching one step.  Olivia beats Bud to the car as Bud prepares to see this alleged wild raccoon.  The dogs have not stopped barking as Bud bends down to see what they cornered under the car and what Olivia has claimed is a raccoon.  As Bud lowers his head below the bottom of the car, the even more irritated raccoon hisses and snarls at him.

Bud immediately pops up and says, "Oh....Oh....Oh!"  He then begins to swing into action.  He goes into the garage and grabs his trusty varmint fighting tool - you guessed it - a broom.  He once again lowers himself to the ground and begins jousting with the terrified raccoon.  Where does a terrified, irritated raccoon go when he is under a car and two dogs and a jousting human are surrounding him?  That's right, he climbs into the engine!!

Now by this time, my two little girls have run into the house and are screaming that a raccoon is in my cute little car (the nicest car of all of our heaps, mind you).  All the while I am thinking, how did a raccoon get into my car.  I rolled the windows up, I locked the doors.  How could this happen?  I instantly go to the door where Bud meets me coming into the house.

"What is going on?" I asked.

Bud says, "There is a raccoon in engine of the car and I am going to start the car."

"What?  You can't start the car!  I don't want raccoon guts all through the inside of my engine.  Oh my goodness, the smell.  Ugh.  Please don't start the car.  Put the dogs in the garage and then the raccoon will leave,"  I exclaim.

I am in my pajamas so I run to put my clothes on as Bud, on his mission, to blend up a raccoon with the motor of my car heads outside to START THE ENGINE!  As I make my way outside I still hear the dogs barking and I hear my car running, no raccoon has made his way out of the car but I see no blood and fur under the car either.  I again make the suggestion to put the dogs in the garage thinking that with the lack of barking, the masked bandit may crawl out of the motor and make his way back to HIS home.

Bud announces, "I am going to take him for a ride."

In protest I say, "What?  No, please don't!  Just...."

Off he and his masked passenger go.

The dogs stop barking and the girls and I go back into the house.  They are so excited that they continue to talk about the raccoon and the dogs.

Bud returns and as he enters the house he is beaming!  Me man, me defeat rascally raccoon or something like that.  Bud is triumphant and as he tells how he drove around the block and about half way around the unwanted passenger falls out of the engine with a thud.  He is grinning from ear to ear!  Man has won!

That concludes Round 1.  Can we say Bud won?  Seriously how often does a raccoon get to go for a drive?

Round 2 (Yes, really!)

In the afternoon - almost five o'clock, I was getting ready to go to my oldest's volleyball game when my two little girls came running into my bathroom screaming and jumping, "The raccoon is back!"

"Huh-uh," I said in disbelief that a raccoon would be so stupid to return.

"Come see!" they yelled.

I followed them outside to my "Bug" where my husband has his trusting fighting broom once again.  This time my car is already running and the terrified raccoon is already in the engine.  The raccoon is so scared that he has peed inside the engine of my car.  Yea.  My car is not only a new habitat for a wild animal but apparently his porta-jon as well.  Great.

Once again I suggest that we put the dogs in the garage and that the scared animal will then run back to his home, unless of course he has decided the engine of my car is more comfortable.  My husband tells me to call my brother and then shoves his phone in my face.  Bud has already dialed and Tad answers his phone.

"Tad, you have to come over now and help us," I say.

Tad questions, "I can't now.  I am getting ready to leave.  What is wrong?"

Excitedly, I reply, "There is a raccoon in my car!"

Tad says, "Well, open the doors and let him out!"

Yes, I actually hear the rim shot in my head!

"Thanks, Tad, I am not that stupid.  In the engine!"

Tad says, "Take him for a drive, he will get out."

OK, seriously?  Do the men in my life just love to drive?  Am I missing something?  Do men just drive their problems around hoping they will just fall out?  OK that is a thought to be continued another day!

I hang up from Tad and once again tell Bud to put the dogs in the garage and close the garage.  Meanwhile the raccoon has poked his head up through the engine and I can see his little face peaking out of my car.  Cute, but not that cute.  He is still the peeing raccoon in my car.

Bud finally picks up our barking Dachshund and puts Hershey in the garage.  While he is trying to dart and weave with our Corgi, Ruby, in an effort to catch her, the raccoon crawls down out of the engine and runs to the neighbor's house across the street.  Bud, the girls and I watch the striped tail menace attempt to get into the neighbor's house via the front door, and Bud announces that he must go get the raccoon off of their porch.  By the time he grabs his weapon (broom), the raccoon has figured out that there is no way to breech the front door and no place to hide on the porch and scampers away into the field behind their house.

Fortunately the unwelcome masked visitor has not returned to our house.  I hope that he doesn't soon either, although I prefer him to a opossum or a coyote.  My husband will have to settle with driving little girls around and fighting over the remote for now or at least until the next time he has to pull out that powerful weapon.  I wonder if it would be the same if he used it to sweep the house....     

Shine On!

So I decided to start a blog....... I have thought about a blog for a long time but was always afraid to put myself out there.  But since all the cool kids are doing it..... just kidding.  Writing has always been very therapeutic for me, especially when I was growing up so why not now?  Obviously the title of my blog is, "In My Life" and yes, in some ways that references an old song.  I do strongly believe that we take a piece of every person who have known or know with us.  Some more than others.  It may be the things we say, a thought we have, an attitude we share, a word we use or maybe even as simple as the way we wave good-bye. 
It is easy for me to see the effect, both good and bad, on my children.  Apparently, I use the word actually ALL the time.  I hear, "well, actually Mom....." quite a bit.  I heard it for the first time from my oldest daughter when she was about 5 years old.  I asked her a question and out of her mouth came, "Well, actually Mom....."  I just about died laughing but then I thought, wait where did she hear that word?  It wasn't a couple of days later that I figured out where she heard that word - from me!  I think I was talking with an employee when out of my mouth came, "Well, actually......"  Yes, I stopped mid-sentence because I was laughing.  I then had to explain the story to my employee, who laughed politely but did not think the story was anywhere near as funny as I found it to be. 
I can remember having conversations with people and then days, weeks, years later something they had said to me, I had repeated to someone else. 
Monkey see, monkey do. Typically people are polite when entering a building by holding a door for you and you typically return the favor to others.  But have you noticed that when someone is generous or kind to someone else, you feel compelled to then be generous and kind yourself?  I was people watching one day - one of my favorite things to do, by the way - and a woman was carrying bags of groceries.  The bag ripped and her just purchased items crashed to the asphalt, some rolling, some broken and bruised.  Many people were in the parking lot and people were rushing in and out of the store.  One man stopped and began helping her gather her items and then another person stopped and another person grabbed up a can that had rolled across the way.  In a matter of a minute, all of the items had been collected and returned to the woman.  Everyone saw the first man who stopped and they wanted to join in and help too. 
This reminds me of my very favorite verse.
Matt. 5:16  "Let your light shine in such a way that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in Heaven."
This is my very favorite of verses because this is the first verse that God lead me to read!  I was 12 years old at a church camp, Camp Shiloh, when God revealed this verse to me.  I instantly memorized it and continue to share it to this day. 
The verse does not say that our works are what gets us to Heaven at all or even that it takes good works to get to Heaven.  It does however refer to the light.  The Bible refers to Jesus as the 'Light of the World' so we are supposed to let our light, the Jesus that lives with in each Christian, shine.  We are called to be lanterns of Jesus.  Without Jesus there is no light, like a lantern that has not been lit but with Jesus, the light, the lantern is bright and it brightens up everything around it.  God has called us to shine our Jesus light.  He asks us to follow His commandments, imitate His life, love and passion for people and by doing this we show good works or good deeds or good behavior.  Others will see this, both Christian and non-Christian.  The Christians will glorify God and maybe the non-Christians will too BUT the non-Christians will begin to wonder what makes you so different.  What is it about you that shines so bright.  Hopefully you will have an opportunity to share with them where your light comes from and that glorifies our Father in Heaven!
Hmmm I guess maybe that is it for today.  Instead of Rock On, I think I will say Shine On!!