A few nights ago, I was planning to go to Ricky's place late at night. For that reason, I left the garage door open since I would be leaving at some point. Turns out I never went to Ricky's house but in fact fell asleep that night. The next morning when I woke up I realized that I had left the garage open all night. I didn't think anything of it but simply closed the garage and went about my regular day.

The next morning as I went into the garage, I realized there were some things that were out of place or strewn about. A few tools were on the floor, boxes that were normally stacked  up were toppled over, and the little trash bin in the garage was tipped over and its contents strewn across the garage. We realized at that point that some sort of animal must have gotten into the garage that night. On subsequent mornings, I would find paw prints across my car paint and windshield. The paw prints seemed to belong to some furry rodent like creature. Okay, fine. I could deal with that.

Tonight, I was in the lab till about midnight. When I came home, all was dark and calm. I pulled into the garage and got out of the car. You never suspect that someone would be watching you at your own house. As I was about to exit the garage, I looked in the corner, and perched upon some boxes at about eye level was a huge opossum staring RIGHT AT ME! At that moment, I pretty much crapped my pants. No seriously, it totally freaked me out.

After a few moments later I regained my composure and realized that I had to get it out of the garage in order to avoid it leaving paw prints and scratch marks on the car again tomorrow morning. I tried poking it with a stick, but that wasn't really making it budge. Opossums are really calm and collective actually. It didn't seem to be afraid of me at all.

My mom came down to find out what was going on. She suggested putting some food outside of the garage and then waiting for hunger to set in. Once it came out to eat, I could quickly close the garage and be done with it. Unfortunately, my mom couldn't even be quiet for one minute for the opossum to even CONSIDER coming out. We were waiting by the window inside the house for the opossum, but less than a minute would go by before my mom HAD to say something. Since opossums have a keen sense of hearing and sight, I wouldn't doubt that it actually heard my mom. My mom had so many questions about what the opossum looked like, what it was doing, why it wasn't coming out. I believe the correct descriptive phrase would be "Taiwanese Inquisition".

Anyways, after about 5 minutes my mom got bored and went upstairs. My dad came downstairs and he decided waiting for this thing to come out and eat this food was gonna take too long. So he decides to grab the leaf blower and annoy the heck out of this animal until it wants to get out of our garage. Keep in mind that it's 12 in the morning and the houses in our neighborhood are built very close together... so, we plug the leaf blower and turn it full blast on the opossum. Holy moly! This thing would not give up, but just kept running around the garage with us chasing it. I had these two sticks that I used to direct it towards the door, as my dad would come behind it blowing the crap out of it. Finally after about 10 minutes, it ran out and away.

As we were putting stuff up my dad goes, "hmm.. maybe we should buy an animal trap next time". That would be easier.