Heidi Chronicles: Dreaming of Spring

The push me-pull you image is priceless. Kids these days!

Good Luck today Cheryl.... first day of the rest of your life!! errrr next chapter of your life.... [that sounds better]

i'm up way too early sitting in the dark... thank heavens for lighted keyboards.

Thanks, Terese!

I'm on my way out. Trying to wake up. Not a morning person at all.

>>Not a morning person at all.

I wonder how many times you have said that in the past 5 yrs.

I've always been a morning person. turn into a pumpkin about 10pm.

Terese,

I don't know how many times I've said that, but...

I am REALLY not a morning person. Today, we agreed that this seems to be a characteristic of software people in general. We are not morning people. :-)

I fed all my little raccoon 'babies' a little while ago, and now I'm off to dreamland. The number of raccoons waiting for me at the door each night appears to be growing lately.

The increased numbers aren't surprising, since everyone who can be pregnant probably is, and Heidi is cleaning house yet, lol.

At least your new co-workers are also not-morning people; that helps a lot. Seems like every boss I ever had was a chipper perky morning type, and personally I couldn't perk in the am if my life depended on it...

Ruth,

It really does help when your coworkers are also not morning people. I've had the other situation, where both the client and many of the coworkers were all up and ready to work at like 6:30AM. I was the 'odd man out'. Not good. If it's dark out, my brain thinks it's still night and I need to be sleeping. I can literally feel myself kick into gear around noon.

I think you are right about the raccoons - think there may be about 8 now, except that they all appear to be yearlings. I don't see any obvious adults other than Heidi. No sign of Dennis so far this year or Bast. If Bast never comes back again, I will miss her, but I'll always be glad she came back last year so that I had the opportunity to see that she made a full recovery and even raised a litter.

I was lying in bed a little while ago having fed cats and walked dogs and...suddenly I though, "raccoons!" I got up and went to the kitchen. Even in total darkness and from across the room I could make out something against the patio door. I couldn't actually see that it was a raccoon face, but I knew it was.

I've started this new thing where I bend down, across the glass from them, bend down to their height where my face is level with theirs. That sort of freaks Heidi out. She will back away under the camellias. She'll inch back if I call her, but you can tell she a little uneasy having my face inches from hers. The youngsters, however, seem to love it. The will stand up and reach for me, although all they can reach is the glass.

I grabbed the camera from nearby and tried to get a picture of that, but the glare from the glass ruined it. I forgot that when I took the other pics through the door, I was farther away.

Edited to add that the putting the camera that close to their faces also caused the yearlings to get back down on all 4s and back away a little. My face = ok. Camera = not.

This message was edited Mar 22, 2011 9:51 PM

Cheryl, I could probably clean that picture up for you!

(running and ducking)

ROTFLMHO, Debbie!!!

Can you 'bring back' the cute critters w/o the leaves and debris? I might take you up on that. ;-)

Actually, the photos I took that particular time were such that I don't believe anything/anyone would be able to fix them. The flash bounced off of the glass door giving me a black background with a giant, brilliant, 'starlight' effect covering most of the picture. The raccoons would have been in the middle of that bright light, thus I'm pretty sure they are lost forever, the camera having only 'seen' and focused on the reflection of its own flash bouncing off the 'black' glass and having failed to capture anything beyond.

Seriously though, the next time I get some actual images of the raccoons seen 'dimly' through the glass, I might be willing to take you up on some of your excellent work in cleaning them up and bringing them 'forward' and out of the darkness. Are you game?

Cheryl, do you have a "candlelight/museum/concert" setting on your camera?

My son was just in a play, and they requested no flash photography. So, I used the "museum" setting. It works great in low light...with no flash.

SO, if you have such a "preset" setting....give it a try.

Debbie,

I do have something like that and will give it a try. It just might be the ticket. I think the play probably had better lighting (even though low light) than that on my patio though. I have a 60watt bulb completely covered by an opaque, plastic globe. It gives off very little light. I appreciate the tip though and will definitely give it a try - as soon as get back to walking well enough to take photos. I'll post my results so you can see how it worked, and maybe me resolve any additional problems.

My camera, which is close to 'dead' now, has MANY presets that I've never even tried - and should. I am bad, bad, bad. I use the macro preset, the 'party' one for indoor pics at night (with indoor lighting), the back light preset (after I take a few bad pics w/o it), and the sunset on very rare occasion. There are many preset icons that I know nothing about, not even what they do. Bad, bad, me - and now it's time for a new camera I can't use properly - when I've worked long enough to get caught up from my recent 'vacation' that is.

Thanks, again. Will give it a try.

OMG! Are you sitting down? You need to be sitting down to read this.

I've been feeding Heidi and the others - still on the patio - have just been too busy to post. The group out there was getting really large. Then last night I saw Heidi out there under the camellia beside the patio. She was the only one out there.

I opened the door to take her some food. Before I could stop her, she rushed inside. Then I noticed she had a tiny kit in her mouth. She took it into the bedroom and deposited it under the bed. I was SO shocked, I just didn't know what to think or do, just stood there dumbfounded. Then she went back out the still open door, grabbed a 2nd kit and stood at the door with it.

I opened the door to see what was going on. She ran in with the 2nd kit and headed back under the bed, refusing to come out. I can't get under the bed. My bed has wooden sides that go down to the floor such that the area 'under the bed' is enclosed - except for a tiny gap the cats can get through and apparently raccoons. The bed is too heavy to move w/o disassembling it. Thus I could not get to her.

Oops. Gotta go. She spent the night under there with the 2 kits. I put a dish of food and some water by the bed. More later...

You might also want to put a litter or some such pan nearby with 'washing water' and some newspaper placed over a open, but flat black trash can liner (hopefully this will provide a 'bathroom' and the paper can be changed each day). Oh you are in for a treat getting to watch those babies. I wonder if she only had two or if another raccoon is challenging Heidi's Alpha status, due to her age. The kits must have clearly been in danger for her to bring them to your 'refugee camp'.

LOL...now I know you don't want the HOA spying on you.

Lady- you definitely do not lead a dull life!!

Sheri

OMG, jumping up and down, this is soooooo exciting, I have chills all over. LOL

Unbelievable, how funny/wonderful is that.

Oh I can't wait for an update!!

WOW!!

now you just KNOW Heidi fully trusts you.

wonder what happened to her 'nest' if she brought her tiny babies right into your home.

Ruth -- do you have any insight on this?? most bizarre.

I do not know what type of sense of humor Cheryl has.... it is April Fools day after all....

** sits pondering **

I can just see her reading all the replies chuckling....

actually -- I'd rather have this one 'real' than the "lady wants her cats back" post.

LOL, I was thinking the same thing.

** pondering with you **

As am I. We can never ignore the date...

I'm sorry, 'Guys', that was my idea of a last minute, hastily thrown together April Fools joke. BOTH this one and the one about Kitty & Cocoa were. I would have told you this sooner but I couldn't. Long story why I couldn't talk to you sooner. Will be back tomorrow to discuss. Hope you aren't too mad with me. I meant well.

^_^ LOL!

LOL... Those were really good ones Cheryl!!

good to see you do have some humor.

Just the vision of Heidi bringing tiny kits and putting them under your bed ... Priceless.

You had me worried!!

ROTF, Susan,

YES, but were you worried that Heidi would tear the house up OR that I was hallucinating???

I had a feeling that this was April Fool....we'd just posted our own over here: http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/1169185/

Hi melody,

I was SO looking forward to the DG April Fools joke that I checked for it 2 days early in error. On Friday I didn't have time to read it - and still haven't. I'm saving it for (a few minutes from now) when I have time to savor it w/o rushing. :-)

It was Google's new hand/motion controls that put me in the mood that day. I have to use google (or a search engine) as part of my job (but don't have to go to DG, thus the need to minimize time at DG when at work).

Still looking forward to checking out the DG joke as soon as I finish my morning routine.

I didn't leave the house yesterday and hadn't even realized it was April Fools Day........silly me I fell for it! Good one Cheryl

Good one Cheryl. YOu could sure tell that you had me sucked in on those by my responses. I was a bit surprised or rather qurious about your not mentioning any concern for the possible domestic vs wild interractions during your work day absence.

For those of you who did fall for the ruse, I apologize for putting you through that, but perhaps we could view things from a different perspective realizing that for a few brief hours you believed something wonderful, you lived in a beautiful world where the impossible is real. Maybe you could see that as a plus. I don't know, since I was not there with you and can't say. Just a thought.

I had a mostly good day today, although I slept a lot probably making up my sleep deficit from the week. A little while ago I awoke from one of my 'naps' and went out to feed the raccoons. Last night I was unable to feed them (covered in my rants thread in Pets Forum where I am trying to keep my OT stuff segregated from my other posts). I had stopped on the way home especially to pick up kibble for them, but suffered sudden onset of that extreme leg pain (nerve pain) such that it was all I could do to hobble to my car and get home where I went directly to bed unable to bring in the kibble much less feed the raccoons.

So I fed them just now. Heidi looks like she will pop any moment, possibly while finishing her dinner. She's not only huge now she has that weird shape, can't describe it, but associate it with 'time'. The shape is almost as if the uterus, large and 'hard' has sort of separated from her in the sense that it seems to have taken on its on separate shape. It's no longer part of a sphere that includes her - if that makes any sense at all. Hard to describe.

I'm afraid that looks like more than 2 kits, too. I was truly hopeful for her to have only 2.

well, maybe she will bring them in and put them under the bed. :-P

I have typed a few paragraphs now for 3 times that for some reason either disappears or never got typed on the page (this I really do not understand) But i must go to bed as my fingers are hurting.
Oh and .
Cheryl...you know how well you suckered me into that hoax. I thought you seemed awfully calm about leaving all those critters in your house together. I also was shocked that Heidy knew exactly where to find her hidey space under your bed.
Does her belly stick out as obviously as a woman's does. Horses also get very big, Allong with
guinea pig who get so big you surely expect them to explode. They look as wide as they are wide!!w
the "fun" of 'April fool's jokes' !

Sheri

and now a word from this nurse and friend; please allow people to assist you just as I'm sre you would reach ou to someone in your condition
.
It's ben a long long time since I got sucked into

Glad to see that you guys took this in the spirit intended - humor. I don't know what to say. I brought up google that morning, saw the new hand/motion controls for controlling gmail (a joke, of course), and thought, "hey, I need to do one this yr on the Heidi thread". I had to scribble something out in a hurry, no time to think of elaborate schemes. Minutes later I thought Kitty & Cocoa needed one of their own, too, and thus the scheme was born.

I TRIED to make the stories so far out there that you would surely question them, and yet give them enough little slivers of credibility that you would wondering if they might be true after all. Just to keep you wondering. One thing that I believe I did, unintentionally, to trip you up is that, until now, I have always told you the truth about EVERYTHING. Thus I have a long track record for credibility. I will only be able to use the credibility card once though. Next Apr 1st you will be on to me. When you read an impossible sounding tale, you will check the date and say, "April Fools!"

When I open the door to step out, Heidi and several of the yearlings hang into the room as far as they can w/o stepping over the door jam. I think it's very possible that Heidi would come inside if given a modicum of encouragement - which I don't intend to do, of course. I think it is even possible, given the level of trust we have established, that she might come in and go back out again w/o freaking out, as long as the door always remains open so that she never feels trapped.

Those things are, I believe, within the realm of possibility. However, I am quite certain that Heidi would never, ever bring her newborn babies into the house, esp considering that she herself has never even been in the house and thus has no idea how safe it might be - or not. Heidi has spent her entire life in the forest. That is where she feels safe, and that is where she would want her babies to be, in the place where she believes they have the best possible chance for survival.

I'm sorry to disappoint those who thought it a 'romantic' idea, but Heidi would never do this - AND I would never have gone to work and left her in her as she would have destroyed the house once she realized she was trapped. She probably would have eaten her way through the outer wall. I would have come home to find a new 'doggy door' in my bedroom - and Heidi and kits long gone, after trashing the joint. LOL at the thought.

If you think back to Cocoa who 1st came into the house as a kitten, you can see how impossible it is that Heidi would ever feel that comfortable in the house, comfortable enough to trust it with her babies. It took months, many months, for Cocoa to even be comfortable leaving the safety of the door. Remember? I had to put his food & water dishes in the foyer and the litter box in the edge of the LR which adjoins the foyer, locating the box where it was close to and w/in sight of the door. I even had to sit on the foyer rug to pet him and play with him. He was an adolescent before he ever made it out of the foyer, and then it took ages before he could feel comfortable in "the bedroom". Remember?

Anyhow, I tried to put the story 'right on the edge', too fantastical to be true, and yet with threads of truth mixed in, things we had discussed before, like the raccoons leaning in when I open the door. But again, I was very pressed for time. I think I managed to weave in more 'facts' in the Kitty & Cocoa ruse.

I'm surprised not to have heard anything from Ruth. I was expecting, with her experience with raccoons and animals in general, that she would tell us all in no uncertain terms that this could never happen. I hope she didn't read the Apr Fools post and decide I had taken leave of my senses.

Thanks, Terese!

Glad you enjoyed the ruse - and the images! Actually, I do have a sense of humor, just not a 'normal' one. :-)

ROTFLOL, Susan (9kitty),

You never know. Maybe she will. I may come home one day and find them sitting on the sofa watching and watching APL with Widget while munching on kibble like popcorn.

Judy, Sheri,

Like I said, I think the fact that I've always been very open and truthful with you guys put you at a disadvantage. I had a sort of 'credibility cash' to spend here. That plus your desire to believe and your not thinking about the date, all helped you to be led astray. At least, you were in good company. Quite a few people seemed willing to believe it.

Listen, let me be perfectly honest with you. I am amazingly gullible. I will believe ANYTHING. I think it's because I expect people to be honest. Psychologists say we expect others to behave as we would. When people tell me something, especially people I trust, I'm inclined to believe it - no matter how far fetched. I've been embarrassed more than a few things by the tall tales I've bought, at least for the moment. :-)

The only way to have people fall for a joke is if they trust the teller. If you had always been a joker and clown, we would have immediately known that you were pulling on over on us. I have a bad story to illustrate: Who told you that the horrors of 9/11/01 were happening? My boss sent the clown of the workplace out to tell us and no-one believed him. I mostly did, because I recognized that he had been crying even though he had washed his face and had 'manned-up' before coming to tell us. Nobody trusted him to tell the truth, therefore: this had to be a bad joke. You on the other hand; are worthy of our trust and so we have to be aware of the date that you told the tale. As one of my nephews had just posted a rant about the invasion of privacy that one of the other Google pranks touched off- http://mashable.com/2011/03/31/google-face-recognition-app/ I was 'primed and ready' to laugh at anything that sounded remotely serious. LOL!

I'm here, Cheryl. But we had company visiting, and the guest room is my computer room; so by the time I read the phony posts, the truth had been revealed. Had it happened differently, I might have fallen for the cat story, though that lady would have zero legal claim on either cat; the Heidi story, no way. You're right, Heidi never ever would bring newborn kits into the house. While she might be curious to explore it herself, she would only do so with a very clear, very close escape route available, if at all; no way she'd bring kits into a human dwelling, even yours. As for closing her inside while you went to work, wow; too horrible to contemplate. I've seen what happens when a wild raccoon is accidentally trapped inside a house. Their panic is palpable and painful, and so is the damage to the house.

Cheryl -- as you can see, i am gullible too.

I will never forget the time, about 25yrs ago, Dh said, OH look, the light bulb factory."
It was dark, i saw lots of light... i was tired, and very trusting in everything he said [can't recall if we were just dating or married already] but about 10 seconds later, i realized it was the commuter airport. Boy did he laugh.

I still can't drive past that airport without thinking of the light bulb factory.