After that, we realized we had a raccoon living in a little tunnel where our porch meets our house and it had tracked poop all over our doors and trim, which was annoying and probably unsanitary. I wanted to kill it but we decided to wait until it left for the night, threw moth balls in the tunnel, and blocked up the hole with bricks. That course of action felt good since we used non-lethal deterrent, which is generally good.
Then we went to visit our friends Erin and Jon in Birmingham, AL, where we were given wonderful steak and out-of-our-price-range wine, which was great. Then we drove down to the FL panhandle and spent a couple days on a really nice uncrowded beach, which was awesome:
Then we used the end of a can of spray-on SPF:
...which either didn't have any SPF left in it or we just didn't apply even coats so we all got these nasty, polka-dot sunburns, which was very unawesome. Liz went to the doctor, twice. They told her she had a sunburn.
When we got home, we realized that the coon had tried very hard to get back in to our house by chewing off shingles, ripping off drip edge, moving bricks, and throwing out the moth balls. I came home from work early to see if it had succeeded, which it had. So then I had to shoot a raccoon with an air rifle, which was heartbreaking. Oh who am I kidding it was the friggen' highlight of my year. The guy at the critter control place we called said the only reason a coon would go to that much trouble to get back in was if there were babies in there, and that it would just grab them and leave once it got to them. Apparently this coon was a non-conformist. We hoped maybe it wasn't with kits and just ornery and liked its cozy little nook and that we hadn't orphaned a litter of baby coons. I'm sure the faint rotten smell coming out of the hole a few weeks later was just coincidence. We gave it a chance to leave so I didn't feel all that bad--I guess mother nature is a cruel bitch, as are air rifles. I didn't take pictures of the hunt or the kill out of basic decency, but it looked something like this:
Then tourist season got underway with visits from my dad and Dave Strand, along with a bunch of guys who traveled out to watch the Twins play the Red Sox in honor of Shane Reese and Greg Mazzuco's upcoming nuptials (not to each other, despite there being absolutely nothing wrong with that in MA). A bachelor party, if you will. We went to the first game of the series and I witnessed my first live Twins win since the second-to-last game at the dome. My Fenway Twins record now stands at an impressive 1 and 5. The rest of the crew went to the Saturday game where they experienced bouts of heavy rain and even heavier bouts of lackluster Twins performances. Shocking, I know. The weather, combined with the previous night's revelry left the gang in low spirits and night two of the bachelor weekend in serious jeopardy of ending before dark. Luckily, Mike Hennies single-handedly saved the evening with his indomitable spirit and some well timed rounds of raspberry kamikazes. People left rested and happy. Which was good.
After three days of regular life, we headed back to MN for Liz's brother Mike and his fiance Vanessa's wedding. We saw some friends, smoked them some pork shoulder for their rehearsal dinner tacos, saw the nieces and nephews, watched as Mike removed Vanessa's garter with his foot at the dance (a first in the DJ's 20 years of DJ'ing, he said), which were all "ups." And then went to our first Twins game at Target Field where the impressive Twins REDACTED the Toronto Blue Jays by a score of REDACTED to REDACTED, which was total bullREDACTED. But then we realized the sun was shining, we were with our family, there was Summit, and we got our picture taken with TC, which made everything good again.
