Uninvited Guest?

This curious little guy (or big guy) either lives under the shed or under the house.  They eat anything and everything, coming out at night to cause their mischief.  Maybe that's not fair, and it's really "cute" but I'm not sure whether having a raccoon around is good or bad news for us living in the cottage.  If anyone has any suggestions, let me know!

It all started when....it snowed a little and we started looking at animal tracks.  There are lots of feral cats in our neighborhood (the humane society traps them, neuters/spays them, then releases them back into the wild) but some tracks definitely didn't fit in with those!  I wish I'd taken a picture, but we looked them up online later, coming up with the fact that it was a raccoon.  We borrowed the trail camera from work, setting it up between the shed and the cottage.

We also got this video footage:

It's only five seconds long, but you get the point!

Book Review #2: The Shack by William Young

http://www.theshackbook.com/

The Shack

I picked up this book yesterday morning before sunrise, even, because I couldn't sleep.  I sat on the couch pretty much all day reading, drinking tea and eating.  I took my book with me to ride along and do errands while Dave was driving.  I fell asleep at night on the couch with less than 10 pages to go and finished it this morning.  My mom gave it to me over a year ago and I hadn't touched it until now, and I'm glad I did.

Combine an intriguing narrative with deep Christian spiritual concepts and you get a book I wasn't able to put down!  Without giving away too much of the plot (because I highly recommend reading this book, whether you are or are not Christian--in fact I've just read that non-Christians often get more from reading this book than Christians do because...you'll have to read to find out why), Mack's youngest daughter was brutally murdered in a small shack in the woods after a family camping trip in the Pacific Northwest.  Three and a half years later he receives a note, apparently from God, to spend a weekend with Him in the same shack.  Mack goes to the shack and returns a completely changed man.  I didn't feel a profound sense of change as I read this book but it does bring home the importance of love and forgiveness and the power of relationships in our lives.