Holy crap. I just got home from a friend's house (I walked, and it's pouring rain) and I come inside my building and the dog starts freaking out. I can see a fluffy tail tip near the top of the stairs, so I assume it's one of the neighbor's cats, as my neighbors are very laissez-faire about keeping their doors ajar. But no. I walk up the stairs and no, in fact, up here there are no doors open, and no, in fact, we are now facing a short dead-end hallway, the end of which houses my doorway, and is currently inhabited by a GIANT RACCOON. It's all puffy and pissed off, and of course Louise is going apeshit, crying and barking and yelling in dog language exactly how she is going to rip its throat out, and I'm hanging on to her leash like I'm trying to land a swordfish. During this the raccoon realizes the only way out is right past us and down the stairs, so it passes within inches of the lunging dog in order to reach the top step, where it pauses to turn around to give us both a defiant "haaaahh!!"-kind-of-a-hiss, and then it runs down the stairs. Man! Raccoons have serious balls. My dog was really going crazy at this point. I made her go inside the apartment and I shut the door. I still have a raccoon stuck in my apartment house. Downstairs on the first floor, there are two doors open: the door to the basement, and the door to one of the first floor apartments. It's very conceivable that the raccoon is now inside the apartment. They are scavengers, you know. (In New Jersey when you'd catch them in the middle of digging into your garbage cans, they'd just look back at you with cigarettes dangling from the corners of their mouths, like, "Whut? Can't you see I'm busy here?") I knock on the open door, saying, "hello? Is anyone home?", like there's any way if they were home they wouldn't have been aware of the wildlife encounter that just happened, what with the dog yelping and my yelling "Holy crap, that's a fucking raccoon!" and the dog claws scraping on the floor trying to find purchase. Anyway, though the door is open and lights are on, there appears to be nobody home. So I shut the door to the basement. Why? 1. If it's down there, it won't get into the open apartment, and 2. if it's in the apartment, maybe the hippies who live there will learn a valuable lesson about keeping their door wide open.

All is currently quiet.