Unintended Coon Sequences

So just one raccoon, although it might have been two, blew my whole weekend, and there's still more to do.

I deconstructed the Zinn Center just enough to be able to wrestle with a 14 by 14 foot chicken-wire top, made by joining four strips of what the manufacturers elegantly term "poultry netting" with wire ties (also called "zip ties") every foot. It took about four hours to staple the netting in place and clip the individual wires to remove the extra footage. The next problem was to figure out how to fill the 3.75 inch gap between the Zinn Center and the side of the house, which, to make it more complicated, has clapboard aluminum siding.

The Zinn Center is not straight vertical, because it follows the slight slope of the deck. It had to be this way to make the six foot wide screen cloth wrap evenly around it. So there's a gap at the top that tapers to almost nothing at the bottom. Add to that the serration of the clapboard, and you have a very unwelcome combination of incompatible surfaces. An open door, you might say, for flies and mosquitoes.

The previous solution was to stuff the joints with insulation rolls. They occasionally slipped, but could be held in place by cardboard and duct tape. But when the raccoon(s) started throwing the stuff around, I had to consider other techniques and materials that would be more resistant to vandalism.

I've settled, I think, on a spray concoction that is like the foam insulation you can spray into cracks, but this stuff is not supposed to expand into huge grotesque beige puffballs that have to be trimmed with a saw. The only time I've ever used that material, it called to mind those horror movies where a whole town is overwhelmed by an endless rolling ball of goop.

And then, of course, there was the cleanup, which is only partly done as of this writing. Vacuuming the deck would have gone more quickly had not the sweeper suddenly ingested a label or something that caused a total embolism in the hose. Another fifteen minutes of disassembly and reassembly made the day seem even more tedious.

The toughest part is yet to come: to fold the chicken-wire into disposable packets that can be dropped into a garbage bag without ripping it to pieces on the way in. Meanwhile, two raccoons have already been back up on the deck, checking on the new configuration, or maybe just scouting for more green tomatoes to pull prematurely off the vines. Let's hope they regard the chicken-wire as a boundary, rather than a challenge.