Where the BLOG have you been???

My apologies to my loyal readers (all 2 of you) out there who have been missing my special blogs. You know, I went to China and all that, and it's just been tough getting back into the swing of things. I've been wanting to blog the 1 1/2 journals I filled up while in China, but that's probably not going to happen, so back to real life.

Tonight, what's on my mind are URINAL CAKES. Yes, you read that right.

The week after I got back from China, spouse and I were out in the backyard and we saw a big-ass raccoon in the neighbor's trash. It jumped down and came toward us. I did that motion where you lunge toward it to scare it off - and it stopped for a minute, then kept coming! This raccoon was a little too bold.

The next week, I was in the dining room, and the cats were gathered by the sliding glass door to our back deck. Then I saw what had grabbed their attention - the bold-big-ass raccoon was right up next to our house on the deck, getting into the garbage (sometimes we just toss it out onto the deck until we are outside next to take it to the cans...) I hit the window and even opened the door to shoo him away, and he didn't so much run off as waddle off like he was bored.

That same week, one of our neighbors approached me about the raccoon. She said she and her husband thought it was living in the garage. Her husband had shot at it with a BB gun when it got into their trash and it ran into our garage. Of course, she also had to comment on the holes in our garage making it easily accessible. I told her I had seen it and spouse and I were talking about what to do (which we were).

She mentioned some remedies she read about - from putting anti-freeze on bread to using mothballs. The anti-freeze idea reminded me of being in high school and coming home one day and finding a raccoon in the driveway that was barely moving. Later, when my brother and I poked at it with a whiffle bat, we found that it had died there. We called the city, and they said there wasn't anything they could do about it, so my brother and I got a snow shovel and shoveled it unceremoniously into a big black trash bag, tied it up, and put it on the tree lawn the next trash day. I really didn't want to have to go through that again.

I thought about calling the city, because sometimes the city's animal control can do something, like set up traps and release the raccoons in the park (or whatever they do with them, I don't want to know). But I was certain he was not living in our garage.

Last week, spouse was trimming the hedges outside that belong to our old fart of a neighbor who never trims them. The old fart talked to him and told spouse about how he had raccoons in his attic and he had to call a pest control dude. The mystery of where they were living was solved.

Last week, we went to the garden store and I checked out the various animal deterant sprays and powders and such. They were pretty expensive, so over the weekend, I tried a "home" remedy that our neighbor had mentioned - mothballs. It seemed better than the "coyote urine" at $20 a bottle, and definitely not as depressing as the anti-freeze idea.

I bought 4 boxes of mothballs from the discount store for 92 cents a piece. I was laughing at the packaging, which didn't seem to have changed in 6 decades. Also, I got quite a few stares at the 4 boxes of mothballs sitting atop the other "normal" items. What's up with that? Why do people look at what is in other people's carts? I don't do that - who cares?!?!

I got the mothballs home, busted open the box and the plastic bag inside, and threw them around the perimeter of the garage and under the deck. I was careful not to touch them - who knows what kind of caustic substance mothballs are made out of?

Last night, I heard the old fart neighbor talking to a lady walking her dog. He said the pest control dude put up some traps, but that they didn't catch anything. He said, "$70 for nothing!" Mmmm, maybe it was the mothballs!

Now, with a few days of a sunbaked garage, our entire yard smells - not like the mothball smell I'm accustomed to, but like URINAL CAKES! That weird, amonia-like smell that I remember from working as the janitor at a church. Oh, how I hate that smell! I can smell it faintly even now, in the house!

That's the story of the URINAL CAKES and why it smells like them at my house. But ya know what? I haven't seen a raccoon around here lately. Or any moths.

NOTE: I just learned from the all-powerful internet that both certain kinds of mothballs and urinal cakes contain the chemical paradichlorobenzene, which is why they smell the same. Also, some dude figured out that, based on his weight, he would die if he ate a urinal cake, but he would probably be OK if he ate 1/4 of one.

I also found an extremely bizarre entry on Urinal Cake Art. Check it.