Midnight visitors

I just got to campus and it's only 6:40 am, but it's been quite a day already.

Nick and I were sleeping peacefully, and had been for over 3 hours, when we're both woken up by a very strange noise coming from one of our cats. I've been trying to figure out how to transliterate this noise into English. I think it would be something like "byyUUUUUUUUUrl." Nick, in his usual middle of the night way, hollers for the cat to hush. I notice that this is a noise we've never heard before, and tell Nick that I think there's something wrong with one of the cats. I can't even figure out which one is making the noise.

So, Nick is thinking better now since he's properly awake and remembers that we've had a stray cat visit our upper deck, which is off our bedroom, a few times. He/she has left remnants of his/her visit. Bella has taken to spending a good chunk of the day behind the curtain that covers the sliding door, so we joke that this cat is her boyfriend. Nick thinks maybe the boyfriend has arrived. Nick rolls out of bed to scare the cat away so that Bella will chill out and we can get some sleep. He pulls back the curtain and finds this:
Two raccoons!! (This, of course, is not an actual photo of these raccoons). I get out of bed to have a look and sure enough, just on the other side of our glass door, two raccoons, about the size of our cats, are staring back at us. They're touching the glass door, checking us and the kitties out. Both cats are pretty freaked out with these creatures encroaching on their territory.

In order to scare them away, I turn on the outside light. This doesn't phase them at all. Nick takes matters into his own hands, scaring the raccoons and me and the cats at the same time. He starts making scary monster noises and banging on the glass door. The raccoons scurry off, one jumping into the trees and the other trying to run down the deck stairs. The cats hightail it out of the room. I try not to have a heart attack.

So, we try to calm back down after our night visitors have left us. It took me at least an hour to fall back asleep, especially because I kept laughing every time I thought about Nick's methods of scaring the beasts away. The alarm going off at 4:45 am was tough. Compounded with the fact that I seem to be coming down with cold symptoms (yes, only about a month after being sick), it's a pretty rough morning.

Apparently, our house is turning into a wildlife conservation habitat for small mammals. First the groundhogs (which I haven't seen in awhile), then I've also seen a black squirrel a few times, and now a pair of raccoons. Granted, we do live within walking distance of two arms of the major park that winds its way through our part of the city, but this is a little ridiculous. We live in Philadelphia! In the city limits! This flabbergasts me!

At least it makes life interesting, right? I just hope Bella can figure out how to handle these critters without sounding the alarm like she did last night.