Exhausting Weekend

I'll just give a very high level outline of what happened this weekend.

A couple of days ago I discovered that I had used the wrong SSN for my son on our taxes.  While this doesn't really impact the return itself, it is possible that the IRS has flagged this and is waiting on some kind of a correction before we get our return (or indeed the mailed return never actually got there).  So on Sat. I went in to the office and prepared another set of tax forms (including the 1040-X, which is used to amend tax returns).  I figure to be on the safe side, I would just send everything back in, including the 1040-X.

I got home in the late afternoon and was told that there was a dying raccoon in my yard.  The city had been called but it would be up to 2 hours before the city pest control turned up.  So my neighbours and I watched as the raccoon moved back and forth between the yards.  It did take a bit over 2 hours, but finally a young woman from the city came over and scooped up the raccoon with a huge net.  She warned the neighbours that they might want to wash down their yard with bleach before letting their dog out.  I presume that the raccoon is quite ill and will be euthanized, though I think we'll all be a bit put out if they manage to save it and then dump it back in the neighbourhood...

After she left with the raccoon in her van, I learned that the raccoon had dug underneath the chicken wire designed to keep them from under the lower deck.  This certainly pissed me off, and I'll have to make it much harder to get into, probably burying more wire even deeper, and then surrounding the vulnerable edges with paving stones or something.  It's a little hard to say whether this distemper would have spread to any baby or young raccoons and killed them, though it's also not out of the question that some are trapped under the porch (after I added some bricks to try to seal up the hole), though I didn't see or hear anything under there.  I don't care much (as I truly hate raccoons and think they should be eradicated from Toronto), though of course I would prefer that they die in the ravine and not under my porch (esp. as it might be some time before we get a rain storm to help wash away any stench).  If we are extremely fortunate, it will be a couple of years before another family moves in.

Sunday was still hot, though perhaps not as hot as Saturday.  I had told my son that I would take him to the Beaches, mostly so he gets more practice riding his bike in urban environments, though it would also be a chance to meet up with a couple of his friends in person for the first time in months.  Getting down there wasn't too bad, though people are generally not wearing masks and are definitely crowding together too much (not as bad as at Cherry Beach though).  It generally is a challenge riding one's bike on the path due to all the careless pedestrians on it, and my son had a minor mishap (later on) where he cut his leg, trying not to run into people walking the wrong way on the path.  I left him with his friends and biked downtown.  It wasn't all that long after I got in to the office that I had to turn back around and fetch him home and make sure he put the right ointment on his leg.  I think in the end, I biked about 2 hours, which really was too much given the heat, and I wasn't able to do much else in the evening, aside from read a book and get through some old newspapers.  I have learned my lesson; I'll try to keep the biking down to roughly an hour max. from now on, at least until the heat wave breaks.