Night Visitors

As promised, I'm posting pictures of the house now that we've moved in and unpacked (most) (well, almost half) (listen, I'm working on it) of our stuff. But before I share those pictures, I have to share pictures of our most recent visitors.

Last week when the garbage truck came around for pick up, they skipped our house. I don't know if it was because the house has been empty for so long or if we actually needed to notify the highway department. But after unpacking - with all of the packing materials to dispose of - and a week and a half of living in the house and having people over, we had quite a bit of garbage to have picked up. I called the highway department today and they promised to have someone out here "first thing in the morning" to pick up our garbage. Not knowing how early that was, I brought everything out to the curb so that I didn't miss them tomorrow morning.

Then Matt and I took a walk when he got home from work. We went over to the old apartment and checked in with the St. Pierres to drop off the keys and pick up any mail which was still being delivered there. After chatting with him for a bit and bringing his garbage cans to the curb for him, we strolled back home. As we approached our street, we saw the first of our night visitors:

There he was, happily snacking away and blocking the way to our door. I am sure our new neighbors thought we were crazy. We stood there in the street, stamping out feet, clapping, yelling and generally trying to make as much noise as possible without disturbing the whole block. This did not work. Pepe le Pew was very focused on the chicken scraps he'd found. So we started looking for rocks. Darn our neighbors and their well-tended lawn. The wasn't a single useful rock to be found. I managed to find a few along the guardrail and we threw those, but we didn't want to actually hit the skunk for two reasons: 1) we didn't want to make him spray us and 2) it just feels wrong to throw rocks at animals. After being unsuccessful with the rocks, Matt pulled some dead branches off a tree and kind of threw them to make them skitter at the skunk. The skunk responded by laying down and making himself more comfortable.

So Matt put his paintball skills to use and snuck around the side yard while I kept watch at a safe distance. He managed to get to his car and pulled it out of the driveway, finally scaring the skunk enough to make it skedaddle under the guardrail. I ran around to the porch and we decided we'd have to move the bags in until morning, so Matt cut the engine and began getting out of the car. As soon as the car lights died, the skunk turned and began running right back to the garbage bags. Back on goes the car. We grabbed the bags and ran for the side porch. Matt got there first, opened the door, tossed his bags in and turned to grab the ones I held. He let out a yelp, which took to mean that the skunk was chasing me and so I yelled and dove into the enclosed porch. I dove right into night visitor #2:

Just to give you a sense of scale, this spider was about the size of a nickle, not including the legs, and he was dangling at forehead level right in front of the side door. My very manly husband ran into the kitchen and told me to get the rest of the bags because he was not going outside again. So I grabbed the camera and snapped a couple quick pictures

Now I'm going to eat dinner.