-
Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2011 - 12:40

Oh guys. I jotted down some things yesterday afternoon about all my recent wildlife encounters, but then had another encounter on the walk home! There is no indication that these things will stop, except that I'm leaving town today. However, over the last 16 years, I've seen plenty of wildlife on the drive home, including: bears, a mountain lion, bighorn sheep, eagles, fucking deers, stupid turkeys, hawks etc. God.

Okay. Last night while walking home along the river trail I heard all this flapping and splashing in the water. It was getting pretty dark but I could see that there were ducks about, so I thought it was just a duck flapping around. But it kept on going, on and on, and I saw that the duck was spinning in a circle, so I thought maybe it had whirling disease or was being attacked by an underwater alligator, but it turned out to be two ducks having a duck fight! Fighting each other with their duck wings and their duck beaks! They were spinning around and around and fighting and floating down the river for like ten minutes. It was very weird. Then they swam upstream to the middle of river and I lost them.

Yesterday morning I crossed the footbridge and saw some tracks in the snow on the bank - feline - quite large. Quite large feline tracks! I figured they were probably bobcat, but those are only a couple inches square, and these were larger. Cougar! Cougar tracks! And there were two of them - do cougars travel in pairs? This is two blocks from my house.

The evening before, after work, I was walking back to the car shop and it was pretty dark and I'm walking through the old neighborhood and then this line of five raccoons walks by! Five! All in a line! They stop and look at me and they aren't scary or freakish like the raccoons in California were, these are nice wild healthy critters, and perhaps they were up to no good but they were not rapscallions.

That morning I'd dropped my car off at the shop and walked, and as soon as I set foot on campus suddenly there is this cacophony of crowing and all these crows are freaking out, swooping around and shouting, and then running around a corner comes a fox! A motherfucking fox! Running around the corner! And it stops and turns around and runs away again, and all the crows swoop and shout after it. A fox being hounded by a murder of crows! I've really never seen a fox up close before and definitely never seen one in town. It looked just like a fox does in cartoons. It was beautiful, really. I don't know where it came from or where it went and I don't know why the crows cared so much.

In that race I ran last Sunday we were supposed to turn around after the aid station on the river trail but everyone neglected to do so and we all just kept on running. We finally figured it out and turned around, and as we're getting near the aid station again there's this bald eagle sitting in a tree looking at us with disdain, and you could tell that, if he could talk, he would have been saying, "Yeah, you guys were supposed to turn around up there. You are stupid." Many of us stopped to look at him because by that point we'd already run a 5K and the race didn't really matter anymore.

I got the front oxygen sensor in my car replaced. On Saturday I bought Christmas presents for my sisters, online, and Citibank called to verify the transaction.
"Do you have your card in your possession?" they asked.
"Why yes, I do," I said.
"Did you make this purchase?" they asked.
"Why yes, I did," I said.
"Very well," they said, "we'll clear this hold." That was on Saturday.
When I tried to pay for my car repair Monday night my card was declined. The very attractive auto mechanic was helping me.
"It's been declined," he said.
"Uh..." I said, "uh, run it again?"
"Yeah, it's been declined again," he said, thinking that I'm some flaky debt-ridden floozy. "Sometimes they have limits on them."
An hour later, Citibank called again.
"Do you have your card in your possession?" they asked.
"Yes," I said.
"Did you make this purchase?" they asked.
"Yeah, on Saturday, and you guys called about it on Saturday. There's only one charge, right?" I said.
"Yes, one charge," they said.
"Yeah, one charge," I said.
"And there was an attempt to charge $299.78 today?" they said.
"Yes," I said, "but it was declined."
"Yes, it was declined," they said. Blah blah blah, thank you Citibank for having my back and watching out for fraud and ruining my one chance to woo the most attractive auto mechanic in town! Ruined!