It would appear that one year ago today I launched this version of the site. It’s been around considerably longer. For a good year or two prior to this round it was decidedly derelict, though. I’m not sure what the exact launch day of the first version of the site was. I’m pretty sure I registered the domain and put a placeholder up in February of 2001. That would mean I’ve been at this crap for seven years. This marks the first full year I’ve blogged regularly, which is saying something. I have no idea what I’m saying, but you can rest assured that it is something.

It’s been a crazy ride, looking back on it. There was the thing and it’s associated traffic, which actually reached six million unique visits a month at one point. I was written up in the New York Times, USA Today and Time Out New York. The video and people reacting to it appeared on America’s Funniest Home Videos. (Though they didn’t even try to contact me about it.) Right after that, the world realized I had more or less nothing else to offer. Unfortunately, they realized this long before I did. I kept trying to turn the site into…something. The forums lingered on for quite a while, but eventually I got bored and killed them off. I had a wikipedia entry for around an hour once, but some douche deleted it because no other articles linked to it. I like to think I was a Z-List Internet Celebrity, which puts me on the relevance scale somewhere between Todd Rosenberg and a 404 error.

I think after all this time I’ve finally decided on where I’m going with this thing, however slowly. It seems to be a dumping grounds for things I think I should capture somewhere that other people might find useful or interesting. It must be working, because traffic is starting to pick up quite a bit in these past few months. I guess if I don’t think about it too hard and just keep writing, it serves all the purpose it needs to serve. So…thanks for reading. I appreciate it.

So not one, but two raccoons took up residence in a tree in our neighbors’ yard last night, somewhere around three in the morning. It seems they were having some kind of loud domestic argument. They didn’t appear to be rabid or anything. In fact, they were sleeping until I went and took this picture. From the relative size of the two animals, I’m guessing they’re mother and child. Our dogs are guessing they’re…well, lunch. I’m pretty sure these too raccoons combined outweigh any one of our dogs. I’m also guessing the raccoons have a much greater survival instinct than dogs that get fed twice a day and who’s occupations consist mainly of sitting on the couch and pulling paper towels out of the garbage. It’s a fight I have no intention of witnessing, so the dogs will remain indoors until these guys move on.

Where we live isn’t exactly rural, but there’s a quite a thriving population of raccoons. I attribute this to the abundance of unmaintained decorative fruit trees. The pickins’ are pretty good, I imagine. They don’t have much in the way of predators in an urban area like ours. If they keep to themselves and stay out of trouble, I think most people are content to let them be.

I’ve always thought raccoons were really interesting creatures. They’re very smart and have eerily human-like hands. I read somewhere that raccoons have roughly the same portion of their brains wired to their sense of touch as humans have to sight. I imagine this is probably pretty useful if you spend most of your waking hours stumbling about in the dark.  Raccoons are decidedly nocturnal, and it looks like this pair picked this tree to camp out in for the daylight hours.