High School Flashbacks

I live across the street from a high school; this is a complete non-issue in our daily lives -- we're at work while school is on, and conveniently there's a track I can use to run on and a pool to swim in both within a sixty second walk.  Awesome.

Today, however, I was working from home.  Still actually a non-issue, but what amused me was the deeply instinctive reaction generated by the school bells ringing.  In equal parts:

- omg I must be late!

- ugh, do I really have to go?

- What class do I have next?

- Frig, I didn't do the assignment

and as the bells chimed about 3:00ish,

- Sweet, time to go home!

Now we're not even going to discuss the multiple decades it's been since I was in highschool, and while some of the school associated thoughts may have been drilled in during uni, uni didn't have bells.  I'm sitting in my home office, working on the kinds of stuff they never taught us in high school, and every time one of those bells rings, I'm back to being 16 again.  I didn't love being 16, so the overwhelming feeling I'm getting after my brain runs rapidfire through the above list of questions is "Woohoo!  I don't have to go!"

Anyways, just sort of amused me.   As to *why* I'm working from home and not in the office today?  Well that would be because when Chris went to let the dogs out this am, he found a dead raccoon on our deck.  Awesome.  All curled up right next to the glass door.  So since he has *just* started a new job, combined with the fact that I was expecting to be doing the jury-duty thing today and had rescheduled most of my meetings to later in the week, I got to be the one to deal with it.   Called the humane society -- closed on Mondays.  Fail.  Except in a rather large win, they have a redirect in their voice mail to Animal Control.   Very quick conversation with them and they assured me they'd send somebody out.

In the meantime, Tucker eventually woke up and realized there was a GIANT RACCOON sleeping Right. Outside. His. Window.   Growling and clawing at the window endlessly, fairly horrified by this situation.  Which in turn terrified Sasha who was upstairs with me and promptly tried to turn into a lapdog.  Lol suffice to say this did not work terribly well, esp as I was trying to type!

Fortunately for all involved, the woman to deal with the raccoon made it out fairly early.  Tucker's "giant raccoon" estimate wasn't all that far off, she said it was one of the biggest she'd seen.   She bagged it and took it away and I washed the deck off (yeah for torrential rain shortly after) and we're good to go.  Why said random giant raccoon dropped dead on our deck?   Well that is a mystery I sincerely doubt we'll ever know the answer to.   When I did eventually let the dogs out several hours later, they didn't even pretend to hesitate there -- ran straight to their usual areas of the yard.   So I'm not too concerned about lingering scent or any issue there.

This is the second rather rude early morning in three days (Tucker had another run-in with a skunk on Sat); we've ordered one of the ultra-sonic pest-repellents for the garden.  We'll have to see how that goes.