The Willies

So I am sleeping tonight (it is currently 3:38AM) when I awake to a decent amount of noise coming from the garage. My first thought: Jill has left the light on and the cats are having a grand old time living it up. I hop up, head to the garage and rip open the garage door in hopes of catching Scooby and Cecil in the middle of their games, hoping that my breaking them up would encourage them to knock it off and get the hell to sleep already. So I rip open the door, flip on the light (there went my original theory) and look in the general direction of the source of the noise. I see a 1 1/2 foot long bald tail jump from our storage racks and hide in the corner. I figure "Oh crap, we have sewer rats". I head back to bed and inform Jill that our worst nightmare was hanging out in the garage and what should we do about it. Rats are NOT good. They eat through anything and can cause a huge amount of damage. Besides, the size of this one makes me think there is an incredibly healthy population to support one of his size.

So Jill and I decide that if it is so big, it must be the same thing that she saw out of the corner of her eye last night as she was shutting the garage door and which she assumed was a neighborhood cat. There are about 50 of 'em, so this is a very valid possibility. That DOESN'T explain the rat tail though, so she must have seen the rat. SO we decide to flush it out of the garage so that we can get some sleep.

First, we make some noise and shake the storage racks. This is 100% ineffective, so we move on to plan 2: remove Jill's car. I back it out and leave the headlights on. Still nothing. At least I have room to maneuver now, so I start removing things from the corner 1 at a time, using a long handled rake whenever possible. After a few minutes of this, Scooby walks up and decides to find this thing and meet it face to face. I finally see it when Scoob is about 6 inches from its face. I breathe a huge sigh of relief. No rat. We have an opossum. It is about the size of Scooby, maybe a tad smaller. It is scared shitless. I tried poking at it with the rake handle, but all it did was open its mouth in annoyance and slink farther back into the corner. We have decided to leave it alone, crack the garage door and hope that this traumatic experience will encourage it to leave an its own very soon. At least its not a rat waiting to chew giant holes in our wall while we sleep.

SO here are some pics of the little racsal. He is actually pretty cute, at least cuter than the pictures show.

Here he is in his original hiding setup. How the hell did I not see him sooner?

Here is a close-up of the opossum. This was after I tried poking him and shoving that paint can in the corner to "encourage" him to leave.


Status update: 25 minutes after starting to type this, as I prepare to go to bed, the opossum is still hanging out in the same spot, but he looks much less freaked out and quite a bit cuter. Hopefully he'll leave soon, and hopefully I'll actually be able to sleep tonight. He really gave me the willies!