Our dogs Suki and Sammy were barking up a storm in the back yard a little while ago at 1 a.m. and wouldn’t come in when I called, so that could mean just one thing: possum. I went out and looked, and sure enough they had one “cornered” on the fence.

I say “cornered” because it was five feet in the air where they couldn’t reach it and it could have escaped in either direction on the fence or jumped into a tree on the other side, so it had plenty of avenues of escape, but it was frozen in fear. Cornered, as it were. So I shooed the dogs back inside and came out with a camera.

I’ve been telling Zoe a serial bedtime story for the past week or so, making it up as I go along and throwing little bits of our lives into the story and ending each night with a cliffhanger. One of the characters is a possum named Eloise. In tonight’s episode, Eloise is currently at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport being interrogated by Homeland Security agents on suspicion of trespassing, impeding in the operation of a jet, and maybe terrorism. So clearly she’s not here, but that’s not important right now — Zoe’s going to love it when I show her a picture of Eloise in our own back yard.

It hadn’t moved an inch in the time it took me to get the dogs back inside, block the dog door, go pee (I really had to go), find the camera, and come back outside. So it was out there in the dark, all alone, free to make its escape for at least five minutes. And it was still there. So it was really scared. But there it was, so I shot a few pictures of it. And it hardly moved while I was taking the pictures, so I took it a step further: I stretched out and grabbed the tip of its tail. No reaction.

It felt like a carrot, sort of. Or maybe a rope. Or a ropey carrot. Whatever, it felt like a possum tail, and if you don’t know what that feels like then I guess you haven’t lived as exciting a life as I have. For I am He Man, Puller of Possum Tails.

After that I figured I had scared it enough, so I went back inside and left it alone.

Ten minutes later Sammy was back out there again, barking her head off again. The possum was still there. Maybe it’s just stupid.

There’s an old song that says It never rains in California / But girl, don’t they warn ya / It pours man it pours. And it’s true; it doesn’t rain for most of the year down here, but when it does rain it does it with a vengeance. Well, it’s raining tonight and I’m so tickled about it that I could die.

It’s the freshly cleaned garage, you see. And the motorcycles in it. The dry, bone dry, not being rained on, safely parked on a flat clean surface with a watertight shingled roof high over head motorcycles. They’re dry, you see. They’re not being rained on. At all.

Oh, it’s a glorious thing. It’s so orgasmically fantastic that I may need to go change my pants.

It’s raining outside and my bikes are dry. Oooo-oooo-ooohhhh!!!! Pllllllllllbbbbttttttttttt!!!!!!!!!!!

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Aaaaahhhhh…..

I need a cigarette.

I don’t have the most vocal readership around, so comments from all y’all are few and far between and so it could have just been the usual, that nobody was commenting anyway, but if you tried to post a comment recently and found that my anti-spam captcha thing was broken and you couldn’t do it… Well, it’s fixed. You may now comment away again. Or not.

I was trolling the free ads over on Craigslist and saw one from someone asking where they could find a cheap Christmas tree. Being flush with the holiday spirit, I decided to help and posted the following ad:

Free Christmas Trees
Someone posted here looking for cheap Christmas trees. I can tell you where to get FREE ones! Starting December 26, start keeping an eye on the curbs in front of houses and apartment buildings. You’ll find just a few at first, then more and more, until by New Years they’ll be all over the place. You might even find one that still has some tinsel on it! You’ll find the best ones right after Christmas, but they’ll probably keep turning up all the way through February or even March.

Happy Holidays!

It lasted all of about 15 minutes before it was flagged down and removed. Nice work, Grinches.

We have a large 2-car garage that has been filled to the brim with all kinds of crap almost from the moment we moved in here about 8 years ago. None of our vehicles have ever been in that structure, only the piles and piles of crap we threw in there and forgot about. Instead, they’ve all been parked out front and exposed to the elements.

From the front, our house looks like hillbillies live here: 2 cars, a truck, and three motorcycles are scattered about the driveway and parking area. Well-off hillbillies, perhaps, considering that the cars are Volvo and Lexus and the truck is a Land Cruiser, but it’s still very hillbilly-ish. And when I decide to break out the tools and work on any of them, well then it really is hillbilly time no matter what the socioeconomic strata: picture a fat bald guy in camoflage cargo shorts with serious plumber’s crack working on a bike or a car in the driveway and hollering “shit!” and “fuck!” and “goddammit!” at random intervals. The only real difference then between me and Jethro in Kentucky is that I still have all my teeth.

Well, all that is changing as of today. Today, Beth and I finished cleaning out the garage and now there are three motorcycles lovingly parked in there where they can’t be rained on or spattered by the lawn sprinklers anymore. We moved all the crap out of the garage and swept out all the leaves and dirt and crap that had accumulated over the years, and then we moved back in only what we wanted to keep. The rest of it — an old entertainment center, a water-damaged dining room table and chairs, Zoe’s old bed — all went out on the curb with a “Free To A Good Home” sign rather than saving it to clutter up the place until we finally organized the garage sale we’ve been talking for years about holding but probably never will.

And the trash fairies showed up with their pickups and hatchback cars and made it all disappear by nightfall. I love the trash fairies.