During dinner last night I commented, “this is a stereotypically healthy meal.” It was also a stereotypically vegan meal: brown rice, tofu, kale, and corn on the cob. While it sounds kind of boring, and it’s true that it wasn’t the most amazing meal ever, it was very flavorful and I felt good about eating it, so here you go:

Orange-Marinated Tofu
Lightly adapted from http://www.food.com/recipe/spicy-orange-tofu-136875
By “adapted” I mean I looked at this recipe briefly, went into the kitchen, and proceeded to pour mysterious amounts of what I thought I remembered were the ingredients together without measuring. So my measurements are guesses. I did eliminate most of the oil, however.

1 pound extra-firm tofu, sliced into 1/2″ slabs
1 cup orange juice
1/2 cup soy sauce
2 Tbsp rice vinegar
1 Tbsp toasted sesame oil
4 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
thumb-sized piece of ginger, grated
squirt of agave nectar
6-8 dried red chilis, lightly crushed between fingers

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Combine all the ingredients except the tofu together in a large shallow dish, then submerge the slabs of tofu. Let marinate for at least half an hour. When ready to bake, pour off most of the marinade, then bake for about half an hour.

My tofu was an herbed variety from Twin Oaks, which explains the specks.

For the kale, which was market-fresh, I just sauteed a bunch of (super delicious farmers market) garlic in some avocado oil, added the kale and stirred to coat it, then poured in a few tablespoons of vegan broth, then reduced the heat, covered, and cooked until limp.

My weekend has been raccoon-intensive, as I worked at the sanctuary both days due to volunteer shortages, and we have 43 – about to be 45, as two more were set to arrive after I left – raccoons. I literally had to clean several of the cages with a raccoon – sometimes two – on my head, which makes it very difficult. Some of them were so rambunctious, it’s worn me out! Here are four trouble-makers:

They are so anxious to “help”. Here an assistant fills his “pond” with fresh water for me:

Raccoons love, love, love water.

Actually, raccoons love just about anything they can get their little hands on. We provide a wide variety of toys and objects for them to play with. Wind chimes are fun for them to grab (and destroy), and pleasant to listen to.

I made the mistake of putting a paper towel down and completely forgetting about it. When I returned to the cage later to fill the pond, I found these two fighting over something it took me a moment to recognize: the shredded, soggy remains of my paper towel. Sometimes cleaning their cages is like taking one step forward, two steps backwards. No wonder I’m exhausted.

Raccoons are certainly not the only wildlife I see at the sanctuary. Currently the big show are the deer, including these twin fawns:

This morning in the drizzle, I encountered this doe …

… and this young buck.

And now, I must go get ready for the play Mark and I are going to see in celebration of the 11th anniversary of our first date!

I’m a very inconsistent blogger. I was totally on a roll there, blogging all the time, and then a lull. It’s been hot again. This weekend I got sick of it being too hot to go to parks, so I did something extremely out of character and got up at 5:30 on Sunday morning in order to get to Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge when they opened, to beat the worst of the heat and to hopefully see more wildlife. I consider 5:30 a.m. more a bedtime than a rising time, but I shocked Mark and myself by actually doing it! It was hot anyway and honestly I don’t think I saw any more wildlife than I do there in the middle of the day, but in lieu of a food post, here are some pictures.

#1 thing I saw? Jackrabbits! SO MANY JACKRABBITS! They were all over the place!

Sometimes I take pictures that I think look like greeting cards. I’m thinking about making greeting cards from them! I could sell them on etsy, right?! Of course, this would entail purchasing a printer of some sort. I haven’t owned a printer since about 2002. But don’t you think this photo would be enhanced by some text that says “Happy Easter to a wonderful son-in-law!” or something in a nice script about the rabbit?

This is a terrible photo from a photography standpoint. The exposure is atrocious. In my defense, I was bracketing – taking lots of pictures with different exposures in the hopes of one of them being right – but I ended up liking this overexposed one more than the better exposed ones because LOOK HOW CRAZY THESE OSPREYS LOOK! They’re staring at me with their humongous eyes! LOOK AT THAT BABY! I didn’t even know he was in the nest until I got home and could look at the pictures on my computer – the nest is very high up and pretty far from the camera. So they so were far away I couldn’t even see the baby, but I know that baby could see me!

There was a lot of bumblebee action.

Closeup of the trumpet vine the bee is pollinating in the prior picture. What do you think: notecard?

I could have a series of wildflowers as notecards?

I decided that Queen Anne’s lace might be even more neat before it blooms.

But it’s pretty while blooming too.

So agrees this pearl crescent (or silvery checkerspot, I’m not sure) butterfly.

So this other guy and I arrived at the refuge at about the same time Sunday morning and without speaking, went in opposite directions. By coincidence, we got back to the parking lot at the same time three hours later, and this time we greeted each other. It turned out we both had the exact same camera and the same telephoto lens. He asked me if I got anything good; I didn’t really think so. Get this: he was all excited because he saw a raccoon! I thought that was fantastic! I was so excited to run into someone so excited to see a raccoon. He said he was slightly nervous because the raccoon got so close, and of course I had to blabber about being a raccoon rehabber and there’s no need to be nervous around raccoons because they are just extremely curious, not aggressive. Hopefully I didn’t sound like a jerk. Anyway, he showed me his pictures and he got some great shots of the raccoon. I was jealous! He also rattled off a long list of other animals he saw that I didn’t (although I DID see a beaver, who swam out of the shot at high speed). Next time I’m going in the direction this guy went, which is apparently where all the action is. I decided not to bore the guy with the 100 pictures of raccoons I had on my camera from the day before, but you guys don’t get off so easy. Since I missed the wild raccoon at the refuge on Sunday, here are some wild raccoons I saw on Saturday:

Haha, yeah, that’s a wild raccoon alright! It really IS a wild raccoon, but it’s Emmy, the surrogate mother I mentioned a few months ago, who is raising some of our orphans for us. As you can see, she’s right in my face. Most wild raccoons won’t actually get this close to a human, but Emmy knows and trusts us. (Emmy was rehabbed at the sanctuary a few years ago when she herself was orphaned.)

One or both of these raccoons peeping out of a nest box might be the youngsters Emmy is raising for us. I’m not entirely sure because there were about 20 wild raccoons on the deck I was on at the time and I can’t keep them all straight!

Last night’s meal was a celebration of summer! It was also a celebration of preparedness. I worked late, got irritated with what I was doing at work, got a headache (which I first blamed on my work but later realized I forgot to take my headache medicine in the morning; damn, I keep hoping I’ll be able to go off that stuff), and was annoyed. I also wanted something simple for dinner like a salad, and I had a ton of fresh vegetables at home (I don’t know how I live without the farmers market during the off-season), but I knew there was no lettuce in the house and didn’t feel like stopping at the store just for that, mostly because of the working late and headache. But then I remembered that the night before I had cooked Future Renae up a mess of black beans! Suddenly my attitude brightened! I drove home and in little time was serving this:

Summertime Black Beans and Quinoa

1 cup quinoa (I used multi-colored)
2 cups vegan broth or water
1 ear of corn, shucked and kernels removed
2 spring onions, chopped (thinly slice some of the green parts and reserve separately)
2 or 3 garlic scapes chopped (or a couple of cloves of garlic)
1 small summer squash, chopped (I used patty pan)
1 jalapeno, minced
1 or 2 tomatoes, depending on size, chopped
a little bit of vegan broth
3 cups cooked black beans
salt, to taste
1 avocado, peeled and chopped
lemon or lime wedges

Rinse the quinoa. Put some oil in a medium pot, then saute the quinoa for a few minutes until lightly toasted. Add the 2 cups of broth (or water) in a medium pot and bring to a boil, then reduce heat, cover, and simmer for 20-25 minutes or until all liquid is absorbed.

Cook the corn kernels in a small amount of water for a few minutes until soft, then drain. If you have super-fresh corn, you might be able to skip this step. I had really good corn and probably didn’t need to pre-cook it.

Meanwhile, heat some oil in a large skillet, preferably cast iron, and add the garlic scapes (or garlic) and green onions. After a minute or two, add the summer squash and jalapeno. Saute for about 5 minutes then add the tomatoes. Saute another few minutes, then add the black beans and corn. Cook until beans are warmed through. Add a little broth to keep things from getting too dry – I threw in 3 ice cubes of homemade veggie stock and let them melt. Season with salt to taste; I sprinkled it with a bit of a finishing salt.

Serve with the avocado, garnishing with lemon or lime wedges to be squeezed generously over the beans. Also top with the reserved green onions (which I totally forgot to do for the picture).

I thought I’d spice things up by flipping my placemat over and photographing the “cheerful” (or, according to Mark, “hideous”) side. This is me attempting to put effort into my food photography. So sad.

It wreaked havoc with my white balance, even though I manually calculated it with a gray card. Maybe the same old black is better after all? I haven’t changed the light in my dining room, not that my food photos ever looked great, but the last few I’ve taken have looked horribly unappetizing. Trust me, this looked much nicer in person.

This also made a very nice, refreshing lunch today.

And now, a chipmunk.

My mother thinks he has a cocaine problem. Nope, just sunflower seeds!

You know who you guys haven’t seen in a while? Torticia …

… and Gomez!

This is a game we play with Mezzie. He is obsessed with pipe cleaners, so Mark sticks them around the house in increasingly difficult places for Mez to get to. Hanging them from the ceiling fan pull is entertaining in that Mez will make these amazing straight leaps to get them down, but also kinda stupid because every time he does, he changes the speed on the fan. So it’s been a million degrees and Gomez keeps turning the ceiling fan off. But we keep doing it. 🙂

(PS, guess what? It’s only 88 degrees here today! NOT 110! It’s…wonderful.)

Weather-wise, this week has been brutal here in the Mid-Atlantic. We kicked things off with last Friday night’s derecho, which I had the pleasure of driving through, and which knocked out power to millions of residences and businesses. This during the middle of a record-setting heatwave. The storm happened around 11 p.m. and the temperature was in the 90s during the storm. There were a lot of miserable, very, very hot people for many days this week. We were fortunate to not lose power at our house, but the raccoon sanctuary was not as fortunate. Without power, they also have no water. So last weekend I was one of the miserable people, cleaning indoor and outdoor raccoon cages in 100+ degree heat with no water but what I was able to stop and buy on the way there.

I can’t think of a better test for my homemade deodorant! It passed with flying colors. I’ve been using it for a long time, so I wasn’t surprised, or even actually testing it as it’s already proven itself time and time again, but even with restored power, working at the raccoon sanctuary today when the heat index was 115 degrees got me thinking how grateful I am to have discovered it. So today’s post is on how to make your own deodorant, and why you should.

I stopped using antiperspirant years ago when I realized how terrible it is to stop your body from perspiring, a function it performs for a very good reason (to keep you from overheating). But I never found a deodorant that I liked. Despite my hippie-ish ways in many things, I often find that so-called packaged “natural” products don’t always perform very well. (I generally find that many commercial products don’t work particularly well either, of course.) But then I found Funk Butter, a natural deodorant made by a small company in Baltimore, my hometown. Not all of Oyin Handmade’s products are vegan – their specialty is using honey as an ingredient – but they are clear about which products are (see their FAQ page). Funk Butter was a revelation. It works really, really well. I used it for years. I have to occasionally ship some to Fortinbras, who loves it too. In fact, if you simply have no interest in making your own deodorant, I urge you to try Funk Butter instead.

The only reason I stopped using Funk Butter daily was, well, kind of perverse. I liked it too much. I was worried that as a very small business, one day in the future they may go out of business. I don’t think this will happen soon because I think they’re doing pretty well for themselves, but I was looking 10, 20 years down the road and worrying I’d be pretty upset if they suddenly weren’t around any longer. I realize this is a ridiculous thing to worry about, but it’s tied to the fact that I hate relying on others. Feeling self-sufficient is very important to me. I have to be able to make everything I use regularly by myself. For example, the only reason I can bring myself to buy the super-wonderful Twin Oaks Tofu (if you live in an area where you can get it, I highly recommend it) is I know I can make tofu of a similar quality myself.

I had to make sure I could replicate Funk Butter on my own, so I searched the internet and found lots of information on homemade deodorant. This was a while ago so I’m not sure every website I visited, but I know this was one of them. The “recipe” is nearly the same in all of them, though most people suggest experimentation to find the right mixture for you. Basically, you just mix equal parts coconut oil, baking soda, and cornstarch. I’ll turn it into a recipe though, because why not?

Homemade Deodorant

1 part coconut oil
1 part baking soda
1 part cornstarch

Mix together. Apply to underarms. The end.

Okay, more detail. The blog post I linked to suggests mixing the ingredients together while the coconut oil is in a solid state. I do it a little differently. I buy this brand of coconut oil from my local Indian grocery, just because it’s really cheap. This huge jug cost me $13 and even though I also use it as a body lotion, lasts me probably close to a year. (It’s a bit beat-up looking because I also use it as a doorstop; so useful!)

The only problem with this is unless it’s quite warm in the house, you have to warm the bottle in order to pour the oil. (This is not a problem right now.) To do this, I set the bottle in a high-sided pot, then pour boiling water into the pot. This usually gets the coconut oil liquidy enough to pour within a few minutes. This also means that my coconut oil is liquid when I mix it with the baking soda and cornstarch, and frankly, I think this makes it a lot easier to stir anyway. After combining all three ingredients, I pour them into storage containers, then I refrigerate them for a while until they’ve solidified. In the hottest days of summer this cooling stage is just reversed right away as it then melts again, but application is the same whether it’s solid or not.

This is what it looks like now, in my bathroom that doesn’t get much cold air from our A/C, when it’s 105 degrees outside:

It would look almost the same in a photograph if it were more solid. Either way, to apply, just scoop out a small amount and apply to your underarms. I’ve used a little jar that used to contain pimentos above. I also use empty Funk Butter containers like this one (I noticed on their website they’ve changed their packaging since I’ve bought Funk Butter):

It works great. In fact, I used to keep a commercial deodorant on hand for “emergencies”, times when I thought I would really need some sort of extra deodorizing power. Well, the emergency backup deodorant got chucked pretty quickly for being way less effective than the homemade. Some backup that was.

According to some sources, some people may require a transitional period before an all-natural deodorant like this will work as well as claimed. I’m no expert on the matter, but I would imagine this has more to do with your body purging chemicals and gunk from your commercial deodorant than it does the homemade deodorant not “working” right away. The only issue I have with this homemade deodorant is I wouldn’t recommend it for traveling because its solidity is so volatile. For that reason, I use Funk Butter when I travel, because it does not melt. This is what Funk Butter looks like:

Baking soda is fairly abrasive, so some people may experience some discomfort from this recipe. I find that the coconut oil balances the abrasiveness of the baking soda perfectly and I’ve never experienced any redness, rashes, or discomfort whatsoever. But I don’t want to be held responsible if you do.

A little more about how freaking awesome coconut oil is. Again, except when traveling, I use coconut oil all over in place of lotion. When I step out of the shower in the morning, I put on a light coat of coconut oil, including on my face instead of moisturizer. I keep it in a jar, just like the deodorant. I used to mix in some essential oils for scent, but I stopped doing that because Gomez likes to lap the oil out of the jar while I’m applying it. Which is fine with me because how many body lotions or moisturizers would you let your cat eat? I feel much better putting stuff on my body that I’d be fully prepared to put IN my body.

So yeah, here’s my beauty routine:

No wonder I’m so glamorous.

In what may be far more interesting news than how my underarms smell, we just got in two teeny, tiny late-ish baby raccoons. They are the tiniest raccoons I’ve ever seen! In fact, one of them still had its umbilical cord attached! They were found at a construction site. When they were discovered, the mother raccoon retrieved their sibling but did not claim this little brother and sister. They were just a a day or two old when they arrived on Thursday, so today they are about three or four days old. They are smaller than the palm of a hand. OH MY GOSH are they cute!!

Look how tiny compared to the baby bottle!!

We call this “hallelujah hands” – many raccoons hold their paws out in front of them like this while feeding from a bottle. I suspect it’s a reflex because they expect to latch onto their mother’s belly, but I love it because I find those dexterous little hands fascinating.

Their eyes will probably remain closed for another couple of weeks.

All the others are getting so big now – about a third of them have graduated to the huge outdoor cages, a move we generally make when they are about 5 pounds – and they are soooo playful and rambunctious and trouble-making, that by comparison these teeny tiny little things are extra-precious. My heart, it melts. (Of course, it’s 105 degrees here, everything in, on, or near me has melted.)

I feel compelled to share a link to an article I enjoyed reading today: Showing Vultures A Little Love. I think vultures are neat, but I don’t think many people do. I’m always surprised when people react negatively when I tell them I rehab raccoons (they are so adorable I can’t figure out how anyone could dislike them), but vultures are even more reviled because they are “ugly” and – this is the part I really don’t get – eat dead animals. I LIKE vultures for eating dead animals. As far as I’m concerned, they are doing me a service; the fewer dead animals lying around to rot on the ground the better. Eat up, vultures!

Taken earlier this year in Occoquan, VA

I got to meet our local vulture rehabber a while ago, which was awesome. Weirdly, it was the day of the earthquake. I was on the schedule to transport wildlife that day, but then the day got really, really strange, what with the earthquake and everything, but I couldn’t see any reason not to deliver the birds I had been asked to transport before the earthquake, so I picked them up from the animal hospital and drove out to Manassas and had a long talk with the rehabber, Mattie, who takes just about any animal, particularly “unloved” species, but specializes in vultures. She was really cool and since then I’ve loved vultures even more. There are a couple of articles you can read about her if you are interested.

Taken a few years ago in Harper’s Ferry, WV

Turkey vulture, taken earlier this year

Since I’m babbling about vultures anyway, here are some other wildlife pictures I’ve taken recently. They are all from Occoquan National Wildlife Reserve.

Anyone know what this one is? I can’t find it in my bird book, probably because I’m a noob.

With that, I’m going to eat dinner… a very happy Fourth of July to my fellow Americans!

So, my grandmother passed away on June 7. I didn’t mention it earlier because I was trying to think of a good food-related tribute to her. The problem is, although she liked to cook when I was younger and I always looked forward to special treats like roast beef when we visited (yes, I liked meat when I was little; I liked everything), it’s been really hot here and I just haven’t been in the mood to make some spectacular seitan roast.

But then I realized that seitan roast wasn’t really the right thing anyway. The one food that always makes me think of Grandmother is butternut squash. I lived with Grandmother for my first two years of college because her house was much closer to campus than the parental homestead. Honestly, it wasn’t a great arrangement: I was too wild for her and she was too restrictive for me. I think everyone was a lot happier when I moved into an apartment with a friend. But there were some high points in there. For example, although she’d never really had to cook regularly for a vegetarian before that time, she never once hassled me about my diet and instead went out of her way to buy me fresh vegetables and when she found things she hadn’t used before, she learned how to cook them, just for me. In particular I recall that the first time I ever had butternut squash was when she cut one in half, roasted it, and topped it with butter and a little brown sugar. I loved it! I remember, for some reason – it’s a weird thing to remember, once looking at my fingernails and noticing they looked really good and thinking to myself, “wow, I look and feel so healthy; it must be all the fresh food Grandmother is making me.” I don’t know how true that is, considering I just as often stuffed my face with pizza, french fries, and beer like any other college student, but now that I think back on it, the time I spent living with her was probably the first time I started thinking about vegetarianism from a health standpoint, and the first time I felt healthy effects from it. I never buy a butternut squash without thinking of Grandmother, and I almost always make it the same way she made it for me.

Unfortunately, butternut squash is not in season and there are none to be had. But I made something for dinner the other night that I thought was in the same spirit of things and probably similar to a dish Grandmother made for me when I lived with her. It might not be a recipe I got from her (and once she discovered the internet, she did email me tons of vegan recipes she found online), but I think it’s something she’d be happy enough to be remembered by.

Stuffed Globe Zucchini
Globe zucchini are a farmers market favorite and are ideal for stuffing with stuff.

2 globe zucchini
1/2 cup cooked brown rice
1/4 cup onion, chopped
1/3 cup vegan sausage, crumbled
1-2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
spaghetti sauce (or use tomato sauce and add some seasonings of your choice)

Another reason this meal had a grandmotherly feel to it was it was very frugal, and having lived through the Depression, Grandmother was a fairly frugal person. It took me no time at all to assemble because the rice and sausage were left over from the night before and the spaghetti sauce was part of a small bit I found in my freezer, which I removed to make room for a large May Wah shipment I ordered on a whim when they sent me an email about a sale. So to make the filling all I did was mix everything together with the chopped insides of the zucchini. But I’ll describe the steps as if I were making it from scratch.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Heat a small bit of oil in a skillet and brown the sausage and onion. Add the garlic and cook another minute or two, then stir in the rice and cook another minute or so. Finally, stir in the spaghetti sauce. Set aside.

Slice the top off each zucchini, then use a knife or a serrated grapefruit spoon to scoop out the insides, leaving a medium-thick wall all around. Chop up the “guts” you removed and add about half of it to the rice mixture. (You can save the other half for another use.) Spoon some of the rice mixture into each zucchini, trying to compact it a little bit. You can mound it up a bit as well.

Bake for about 45 minutes, then remove and let sit for 5 minutes before serving. I baked mine in the toaster oven, which was a perfect fit and didn’t heat up the kitchen. Since the tops of the zucchinis were so close to the top of the toaster oven, though, I covered them lightly with aluminum foil to prevent scorching.

I served it with a couple of vegan “drumsticks”, just because the May Wah shipment had arrived and I figured I’d better get started on eating it.

I asked my mother to send me some pictures of me and Grandmother together. She sent me a bunch but I liked this one because Grandmother has a cat on her lap. My love of cats was directly inherited from my mother, who inherited it from her mother. That side of the family has always grown up with cats, and in particular, Siamese cats. (Which I think Jes will like.) The handsome man is my grandfather, whom I called Bobby in imitation of my Grandmother (toddler Renae liked the sound of the word “Bobby”), and who died way too young.

I was struck that almost half of the pictures Mom sent were pictures of Grandmother reading to a little Renae.

I’m pretty sure I’m wearing a totally awesome kitten shirt in this picture.

No wonder I’m a bookworm!

Another thing that stands out about my grandmother is she was always on the forefront of new technology. She was the first person I knew to get cable television and we’d all crowd around her set and watch MTV when it was in its infancy. I’m not old enough that electric typewriters were a “new technology”, but I had a weird typing obsession as a kid so she taught me how to touch type and bought me an electric typewriter. Because I was the type of child who asked for a typewriter. While we had a standard Atari game console, Grandmother had an Atari computer. I was online before just about everyone I knew, but my grandmother’s was probably the second or third email address I ever sent email to. One thing she didn’t seem to believe in was a paperless society, because she has binders full of printouts of every single web page I’ve ever had, most of which are just embarrassing. I was flipping through one such binder one of the last times I was at her house and she had printed out a review I wrote of Aleister Crowley’s Diary of a Drug Fiend. It was a very negative review – more of a rant, really – but still I was wondering why in the world she’d want to read, let alone print out and preserve for posterity, such a thing. The reason is, her granddaughter wrote it; that’s the only reason she needed. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is she was a very progressive lady in her way. Definitely not a technophobe like some members of generations older than mine (I’m looking at you, Dad!).

Rest in peace, Grandmother. Thanks for reading to me, teaching me to type, letting me play your video games, watching MTV with me, taking me on trips to look at tiny ponies, tolerating (to some extent) me living with you, feeding me, introducing me to butternut squash and a myriad of fresh vegetables, reading my websites, sending me email, and the very Grandmother-like binder I have full of vegan recipes you found online and emailed me after I told you I’d gone vegan and what that meant. Many of those recipes were the very first vegan dishes I ever cooked, in fact, the first real cooking I did. So there’s a little of you in I Eat Food.

In other news, Mark and I were unluckily caught in the derecho Friday night. I was driving on I95 South, coming home from Baltimore and watching what we thought was just heat lightning constantly light up the sky, when without a shred of warning, a sudden hurricane-force wind pushed our Jeep over into another lane. Fortunately no one else was there, but it was scary. So I pulled off into a parking lot away from trees and we sat it out and watched it. I’m kicking myself for not taking pictures. News radio warned us of complete and utter mayhem, with millions of power outages, thousands of downed trees, accidents, and other travel nightmares, but although it was very, very, very dark, once we got back on the highway, our drive was relatively easy. Luck wasn’t with those on the inner loop of the Capital Beltway, but for us on the outer loop there were only a couple minor disturbances. And although it looked very much like we would be coming home to a dark house with no A/C during this record-breaking heatwave, we were again extremely lucky to have power once we finally made it home. So we are feeling very fortunate. Most of our neighbors are not as lucky. In fact, there is no power or water at the raccoon sanctuary, so let me tell you: today was fun. I’m actually heading back there now to take the raccoons more bottled water from our house, as well as some laundry I did for them. These are some wild raccoons that were restless in the heat around high noon today:

Raccoons usually come out at night, but they will make appearances during the day: it does NOT mean they are rabid. (That’s today’s Raccoon Fun Fact!)