Things that Go Bump in the Night

One night when I lived in Palo Alto, I woke up at 4am to a lot of commotion outside. I looked out the window and there was a family of raccoons in the backyard. The mama was chilling out by the fence. Two of the kids were tumbling around and wrestling with each other in the middle of the grass. The other two kids were trying to push over our tiki torches. They were each standing on their hind legs next to a torch, holding it in their little hands and rocking it back and forth.

The other night I again woke at 4am to noise and commotion outside my window. This time, I obeyed my rule to never investigate when you hear a strange noise (that's how people always get killed in movies), so I just laid there. At first it sounded like something was being scraped back and forth across something hard. Then that sound stopped, and there was a funny squeaking sound - or rather a series of short, rhythmic squeaks. Then the scraping again. Then the squeaking again. Etc.

The next morning I went out to investigate, half expecting to find a dead, tortured animal laying there. Instead, I found this:



I guess a little critter got ahold of a neighbor kid's squeaky toy and decided that there might be something tasty inside....