The Truth About Murphy's Law and Chimney Racoons

WARNING: LONG POST AHEAD!

If you’ve been following along on this artful journey then you probably noticed that we’ve been off to a rough start. I made the tiny mistake of starting this blog while starting a new art challenge…while traveling out of state to help clean out a house that requires a lot of time and manual labor. You may even say that I bit off WAY more than I could chew. Maybe. It’s possible.

By Day 3 of Inktober, I was already feeling flustered and from there it kinda all just went downhill.
Enter Murphy’s Law: My twelve day trip to Boston turned into a month-long fiasco. One thing after another just went wrong. A major storm blew threw the area for a couple of days making it impossible to fix up the house so we extended our trip a little to compensate for lost work days. There was a whole week of trouble with the bank so then our trip was extended a little more. Then our car decided it didn’t like the idea of driving back to New York so it had a mechanical melt down. So then our trip was extended even further. We got the car fixed and that’s when my computer decided it too would create an act of mechanical mutiny and take away my online connection privileges. Perfect.

After all of this, I decide that I will just upload everything when I get home because surely, we will be going back in a day or two. Right?

At this point my partner in crime (PIC for short) and I decided “We’re definitely leaving in the morning! So let’s get some more work done at the house before packing tonight.” So while shuffling boxes around the living room that night I hear a strange chirping and cooing sound. I can’t really describe it but it was kind of creepy and I prayed that it was just an animal outside the window that sounded like it was inside of the house. Twenty minutes later, I hear what sounds like a cat sneezing in the fireplace to my left. Now, I could lie to you and say that I nonchalantly challenged the mystery fireplace goblin to a duel using the firepoker as a sword but you and I already know that what I really did was yell my head off, grab my purse and my PIC and run for the door. Yeah, I have no shame. So after a lot of Google searches I found that the most likely suspect was a racoon. Further searches took me down the horror train of things they can inflict on your house if inside. Things I will never be able to unsee. Because it was late at night, there was nothing we could do until morning…which meant extending our trip yet again.

When morning comes, we find that no one can come out until the following day but thankfully the wildlife expert says that the racoon was most likely in the chimney or on the roof at the opening of it. Because of the way chimneys are built, the sounds that the animal made were amplified to sound like it was inside of the fireplace itself. The bad news is, once he used humane methods to deter the animal from taking up long term residence in the chimney we would have to listen out for more sounds for a few more days to make sure it worked. So our trip was extended yet again.

The good news is that there were no more sounds. The bad thing is that something else in the house decided to break. But sometimes you have to know when to quit. So we did. We’re back home now and after much needed time to recuperate I’m settling back into a daily drawing routine.