Heidi Chronicles: Masked Invasion

tetleytuna,

Until I read your above post, it never occurred to me that little Widget might share a nick name with our former president. ;-)
(Oh, wait. still on medication. must keep the 'humor' to myself.)
Thanks for the info RE the neosporin. I had to run out just now to pick up my meds. While I was there I picked up a tube of the neosporin for him. I can keep him from messing with it while he is beside me on the bed.

The groomers do a good job. The stupid stuff is usually done by me. I'm not going to try that again. That they have sensitive skin is good info. I didn't realize but now that you mention it, I've often wondered why skin related things that normally don't seem 'that bad' always send them through the roof.

This morning when I let Widget out back, I looked out to see him running across the yard as though he had been shot out of a cannon. At the time I didn't realize he had the razor burn, so I thought maybe he was chasing a squirrel or something. Later when he didn't come back to the door to be let in as he normally does and didn't come when I called him, I went out to look for him. Believe it or not I found the little guy out there sitting on a cool, [dew] damp patch of clover in the wet part of the yard.

Glad to hear that your back problem is better now and that all went well with the surgery. Thanks for letting me know. It is good hearing from the various people who have had similar problems.

The more raccoons I meet, the more amazed I am by Heidi. Most are adorable, but Heidi is one of a kind in behavior and smarts.

Yep, sounds like your raccoon is back. She was probably just sleeping it off during the period of ice and snow and is now back - and very hungry. Raccoons are amazingly strong, much stronger than you would ever imagine. I learned this when playing tug of war with Dennis over bags of treats and such. Also, there is one video of Dennis in which at the very end she stands upright and grabs the camera lens on either side with her hands and squeezes. You can actually hear the camera 'scream' when she does that. Now you wouldn't expect a raccoon to be able to squeeze a camera lens hard enough to make it 'whince' in pain, would you? (Actually, the sound is the material being compressed. Yikes.)

For me though, the most incredible indication of raccoon strength and the one I will never forget was the time I gave Dennis a gentle but strong push with the flat of my hand against her side - and nothing happened. Dennis was on the smallish side. She probably didn't weigh more than 15lbs if that, but when I pushed her nothing happened. It was like she was made of stone and bolted to the ground. She didn't budge a millimeter and to this day I can still recall how 'hard' her little body felt against my hand. Not to be outdone, I gave it an extra shove and pushed harder ...and harder...and harder. I was unable to move her period, not even an inch, no matter how hard I pushed. Even now as I recall that incident it seems impossible to me, but it's true. It seems to defy the laws of physics. If she only weighs 15lbs, then 15+ lbs of force should move her, right? But that didn't seem to work in reality.

Several times here I've mentioned (as has Ruth) about how strong they are, but from my own experience I doubt that anyone can really wrap there head around just how strong these creatures are without experiencing it for themselves simply because their size to strenght ratio defies anything with which most of us are accustomed. I could have moved a horse with less pressure than I exerted against Dennis that day. (That's not a fair comparison, of course, since horses are trained to yield to us and because the tendency to do so is part of their general makeup. Clearly, raccoons have no similar inclination to yield to pressure. Those guys stand their ground - even when they are friendly like Dennis. It just doesn't seem to occur to them to yield.)

I'm going out to feed the raccoons in a few. Have some [hopefully quick] paperwork to do after that. Then if it's not too late I may try to get us switch over to a new thread.

While at the drug store and while on the 1st aid aisle looking for the neosporin, I saw and purchased a 1st aid spray with a touch of lidocaine for anesthetic and something to kill germs. (Bactine). I put a tiny spritz of that on Widget, just one to see how it goes. That seemed to work really well as he is now sleeping.

Did everyone see my notice above that the spring flowers are starting to bloom? I figured that would be good news for all as it means spring is on its way there soon. A number of daffodils are open in the front yard with others about to open, and the magnolias (the pink ones) are blooming. It's starting, Folks, and from my experience once it begins it goes into hyperdrive quickly.

Widget seems to be feeling much, much better now after that spritz of lidocaine. Earilier to night I also gave him a dose of his prescription NSAID, a sort of doggie Motrin. He has stopped running around in circles and such and is acting normal, as though it no longer hurts (at the moment). I just gave him a bunch of dried lamb lung as a treat to make up for his pain and to say "I'm sorry". He's very happy now - because he really loves that stuff, and I usually only give him a teensie piece as a reward for or training aid now and then.

I guess now I understand why he always runs away when he sees me with the brush, the comb, the nail clippers, etc.

Awww, glad you got the baby feeling better. Now, remember, no more maltese bushwhacking! LOL
Spring is almost there? Wow!

Heidi was waiting in the feeding area for me when I went out. I called her, and she came right up to me. I had to look around a bit for her dish which had been relocated. I guess she must have been pretty hungry and/or tired of waiting for when I stooped down to transfer the food from the bucket to the bowl, she just walked right up and reached out to put one hand on the rim of the bucket. She didn't try to snatch it away or anything. When I reached in to grab a handful to put in her bowl, she removed her paw from the bucket and stood waiting - semi-patiently.

The kits came out in droves. Things went quite well though. They are beginning to understand now that they are to eat elsewhere. I couldn't help noticing that they behaved much better in the absence of treats. There was more eating, much less roaming about to see what everyone else had, and almost no fighting. So they can only behave when there is only one kind of food, everyone has it, and there is nothing to fight over.

Once again, about 1/2 way through the meal Ursula took Heidi's food and I had to repeat the 'running her off' maneuver to return the food to Heidi. Heidi was wheezing even more tonight. I counted 27 consecutive cough/wheeze things. Can't be too long now.

Our climate is way behind yours in season, Cheryl, but even here there are signs of life. Our earliest bulb, the winter aconite, is blooming, and crocus foliage is up and growing. So yes, spring is coming, just much more slowly here as always.

Poor Widget. The spray with lidocaine was probably a great idea, since razor burn is really sore.

Your co-worker has set a new record for silliness. We used to get the occasional phone call from citizens who were convinced that they or their pets had contracted rabies because a raccoon had walked through their yard, and it was hard to keep a straight "face" on the phone dealing with them, but catching rabies from playing with a friend's dog tops it. The boy has lots of imagination, but I suppose it isn't funny to him. Wonder how he explains the fact that you're still alive after years of interacting with (gasp) raccoons?

Ruth,

You know, about Ralph's rabies scare, the fact that he knows I've been playing with the raccoons for years now w/o incident is quite odd isn't it. He jokes with me about the raccoons, picks at me, etc. In the beginning he was always telling me that one day those sweet little fur balls were going to turn on me and rearrange my face - like one day I would be showing up at work with half of my skin missing after they got through with me. Eventually, he gave up on that as the raccoons continued to play nice.

But in all that time I only remember him mentioning rabies once - to say what if I got rabies and gave it to the guys at work, i.e. him. I figured he was surely joking, so after pointing out that I don't generally scratch or bite anyone during software development, I forgot about his comment, and he never brought it up again. Later when I started getting the vaccine I told him about that and that he wouldn't have to worry anymore about contracting the disease from me. (For the next few weeks as I continued to get shots he joked that I would come in one day with my arm so swollen it was fused to my head and stuff like that, so I guess he does have a creative imagination. I figured he was kidding, but in hind sight, perhaps not so much.)

What I found simply amazing was how he managed to extrapolate from 'sore throat', a fairly common and benign (albeit painful) human malady, to rabies based on the fact that rabies makes it excrutiatingly painful to swallow. This case calls to mind the sentence doctors use to remind themselves to avoid this kind of thinking: When you hear hoof beats think horses not zebras.

As I said, when I 1st heard Ralph talking about how he thought for sure that his soar throat was indicative of rabies, I really though surely he was joking as that was just too absurd to be possible. By the time he told us about it, though, he had already been to his Dr and the Dr had already told him in no uncertain terms that he was not suffering from rabies. The Dr apparently gave him a greatly abbreviated explanation of rabies saying that (1) with rabies by the time you have symptoms you are going to die and (2) by the time you reach the soar throat stage of rabies you would be horribly, horribly and quite visibly ill - but I'm not sure Ralph really grasped that last part and the difference between his soar throat and the way a rabies victim would look and feel at that point.

The good news is that Ralph does at least now understand and accept that he doesn't have the disease and isn't dying any time soon. I don't know if this has anything to do with his 'problems', but Ralph doesn't like animals very much and doesn't interact with them. Furthermore, although he and his parents are US citizens, he was born and raised in Saudi Arabia. One has to wonder how cultural differences there may have effected his development.

I think this gets back to that thing I said once about perspective. Sometimes, often really, we humans need to step back a bit and look at the big picture to try to get things back into perspective. After all, any lucid person should be able to rationalize that if rabies were so easily contracted just by playing with a dog for a few minutes then given the prevalence of dogs in our society, rabies would surely be rampant and people would be dropping in the streets like flies in a manner that would make the Plague look minor - and that not to mention the crazy people like me who play with the raccoons.

Enough about Ralph. I just thought the rabies thing was of interest and at least loosely connected to the topic of raccoons.

...just wondering if you have all these postings saved into a file. This should make for an amusing book. Forget Marley...Heidi rocks!!!

This raccoon saga also reminds me of Meerkat Manor. We need to see Raccoon Ranch or Raccoon Romper Room on the Discovery Channel :o)

~ Cat

Oh, my, Cat - Thank You!

Thank you very much for that wonderful compliment! I do have the 'Heidi Files' saved away and am working on a book.

Ok, I'm calling the Discovery Channel now. ('Raccoon Ranch or Raccoon Romper Room' LOL)

Happy Birthday, melody!

Hope you had a great day today.

I think "Romper Room" would be awesome!! just think how many times Heidi had to "break up the kids".

Yes, just the other day she had to go over there to 'break the up' when the rowdy kits had one of the 'good' kits down and were 'killing' it. The good kit started screaming and Heidi headed over there in a flash 'talking' all the way. She didn't even get all the way to them before they scattered. They know who not to mess with.

Raccoon Romper Room. That is pretty creative.

Very late this time, but I finally started a new thread at: http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/952122/
So, we will be moving over to the new thread now. Don't forget to mark/watch the new thread!