I just got back from three nights in my beach town since I am getting a new roof and I had to check up on the job and pay some money, too.
My one-hundred-year-old house has a fancy pattern of swirls in the stucco, which is causing an issue with the aluminum cap on the flat roof. The roofer doesn’t know what to do. I say caulk the thing all the way around, but I know he doesn’t want to do it. I might have to get another guy to do that. Otherwise, I will have the perfect place for spiders to put their egg sacs where they will be safe and dry. And who wants a bunch more spiders? I already have plenty.
Once, I left my pajamas down there for two weeks, and when I put them on, a big black spider crawled out of them. Insert scream here.
But I digress. The whole point of this post is talk about the big three things that happened during those three days.
- I walked behind my property onto my next-door neighbor’s property to see if my neighbors to the south had gotten their foundation poured for their ADU (granny flat). The answer is no, but when I stepped back there, I discovered big black poop, 1.5 to 2 inches across, with lumps. No dog has a butt hole big enough to make that huge of a poop. It was a mountain lion, and yes, her lot backs up to open space, and yes, there have been mountain lion sightings in the area. A sign is posted on the rec trail behind her property.
- When I walked my dog yesterday, I got halfway home and saw two bucks ahead, and they made no decision to move off the road. I waited and even walked closer, but no, they weren’t going to yield to me and my dog, so we turned around and went back the way we came. Bucks don’t like dogs, especially barking dogs. I made the right choice.
- I went to a kid consignment store and was in there for ten to fifteen minutes. When I came out, my Prius was covered in seagull poop. More than one of them had executed target practice on my hybrid car. And the irony is, their poop is white, and my car is white, but now the passenger window is also white. WTF, seagulls? What did I ever do to you?
When I got back, my neighbor from across the street was in the shared driveway, assuring my next-door neighbor that I had found raccoon poop, not mountain lion poop. I took her back there and showed her, and she changed her answer to coyote poop. Now, coyotes come in various sizes, but they never get bigger than a big dog. I’ve had big dogs. I’ve seen their poop. It is not two inches in diameter. Their butt holes aren’t that big. But a mountain lion’s is.
I worked eleven summers at Girl Scout Day camp in the hills of Lafayette in the Nature unit. We hiked. My cohort had a bandana with all the types of animal scat on it. We would gather around the scat and decide what it was as a learning opportunity.
Sorry, Trish and Maria. Mountain lion scat. Be careful.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 