No, I'm not talking about kids. Not talking about humans either. I'm talking about raccoons. Little nocturnal devils that sneak into your garden and eat all your ripe tomatoes and drink your hummingbird water. The little rabies-carrying freaks that knock down your tomato plants and brush off the unripened tomatoes so that they'll never ripen and you'll never get to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Those thieving little brats who climb into your garbage can and pull everything out and scatter it all over your yard, then eat your tomatoes and leave smashed bits and seeds behind.

Yes, those creatures.

We came home after a week of camping (very good time, by the way; more on this later) to find our garden ransacked. Our first instinct was to blame it on the neighbor kids, until we remembered that kids don't much like vegetables and it would be a waste of time for them to come over and take every ripe tomato off the plant. Then we thought squirrels were behind it, until we realized that squirrels would much rather grab one juicy tomato and carry it off into a tree to eat it, rather than just eating a few bites and mashing the rest into a pulp. Then we remembered our raccoon problem from a few years back. One of our neighbors trapped a bunch of raccoons a few years ago and took them accross town and set them free. Well, sadly, he passed away about a month ago, and it seems the raccoons found this out and came back. And now we're doing everything we can think of to get rid of them. Dad rigged up a motion sensor light last night, but that didn't do anything. We bought some sort of spray today and sprayed out tomatoes with it, and hopefully this will do the trick. If not, I'm tempted to buy a BB gun and sit outside all night to BB the little buggers in the rear. Or, I could use Dad's slingshot, if I could figure out how to aim it. Apparently it's illegal to kill the little freaks.

I'll leave you with this last thought: Can you beleive we live in a country where it's illegal to kill these thieving mammals, but perfectly acceptable to allow a mother to murder her unborn child? Something about this seems wrong. Very, very wrong.