August 12 - Robbed this morning, but even though he was wearing a mask, we could identify him in a lineup. Unless of course he brought his family and friends with him

 Howard and I were sitting on the back deck this morning when he noticed a thief in our backyard, hiding (not so well) in out grape vine. Boldly eating our grapes, very delicately, I might add. 

He wasn’t very scared when I yelled at him (or her????) but he did run away when he saw Howard come towards him with a big stick - a 2x4, I believe Howard called it. 

However, he didn’t go far.  There was some water in an old plastic side belonging to the kids swing set, and he decided to play around in that for a while. 

I wasn’t sure what he was doing, but we soon realized he had found an old almost deflated balloon, which I thought he was trying to eat, so of course I imagined we would either have to watch him either choking to death, or find his stiff corpse in the yard in the morning. But he is a raccoon, so smart and resourceful - he would put one end in his mouth, hold onto it with his ‘hands’, pull it taut, then let it go, I assume getting a bit of splash in the process. He must have been having fun, because he did it lots of times before he wandered away. 

So skip about half an hour. We were still sitting on the deck, when I caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye, and though it was our cat. But no, this bold little bugger had snuck up to the deck, about one foot away from us, and was ready to jump up. When he saw I was looking at him, he run away. Guess I’m as scary as ever.

Well, there will probably be no more grapes on the vine in the morning, but I did grab a bowl of them after he left. Steve insisted I wash them before eating them though. I’m not sure when our roles got reversed. 

The only other thing worthy of blogging is the weather forecast. 

I’m not looking forward to the next 5 days. I told Howard we should get up really early and do what we need to do before the sun gets really nasty, but I know I’m not going to want to roll out of bed at 6AM. 

I’ll probably just stay in our bedroom all week hugging the A/C.