How I Got Rabies

First of all, I do not actually have rabies. The title is a joke. I feel the need to clear this up so as to avoid a frantic phone call from my mother.

Anyway! Last night I was walking from the laundry room back into my apartment, and came upon two raccoons. I knew they were around, as my upstairs neighbor mentioned them as one of the reasons why I should stop leaving a little dish of cat food out for the neighborhood stray cat I felt sorry for. But I'd never seen them before. One of them took off up a tree, but the other decided to stick around and observe me. It turned out that he loved being the center of attention and was quite photogenic. Look!



Isn't he cute? For allowing me to take pictures of him, I gave him some of the cat food, being sure to do so quietly so the upstairs neighbor wouldn't know of my raccoon-attracting activities. I left a small pile of the stuff just outside my door, and my raccoon friend got brave enough to come eat it. He even brought his shy friend!



By the end of the night, they got greedy and came back to my door and stared in at me in the hopes that I would leave them some more food. I did, although by that point they were brave enough to start walking towards me when I came outside with a bag of food, which was kind of unsettling since I like looking at the raccoons but I don't like getting rabies. Plus, they're surprisingly big and I'm fairly sure the two of them could overpower me and take over my apartment if they really wanted to. So I kind of yelped and threw the food at them and ran back inside. They didn't seem to mind that, since they got food.