Where the red ferns kill mockingbirds. Or something.

Oh. So I totally forgot.

Right.

Well, on Saturday or maybe Sunday ... Friday? I dunno. Anyway, we decided it would be nice to go for a walk around our apartment complex. Normally we walk around the same little trail. The trail goes around the newer construction that we live in as well as the new townhomes they built up that are part of the same area.

But then there's the old part.

About a month after we moved in, the apartment folks sold off the "old" part of the apartment complex. It's probably like, 20+ years old or something. At least it looks that way. I guess it might be like, 10-15, but since they're apartments, they age twice as fast.

Anywho, I wanted to really see where some of the roads went and how vast the older part is. I never knew and never paid attention when I looked at the satellite photos. Mayhaps a shortcut would show up! Or the road or sidewalk would connect to something fun!

So we're walking. And walking. And it's getting uglier and uglier. There are a lot of fountains, though. Asim liked those. And then I see that it just kind of ends. There's a road, but you'd have to cut across the grass. And besides, there's no sidewalk on that road. So Asim's getting a little fussy now, time to head on back. We venture onward, hoping a parking lot will loop back around.
Then Maria freaks out.

Sitting on top of a Dumpster is this giant freakin' coon. Like, huge. About twice the size of Asim. I didn't bother checking Asim's reaction -- I was too busy hauling him and the stroller away from this potentially rabid beast. And the coon just stared at us, like, what? It's the middle of the day, I gotta eat too, you know.

Since parking lot didn't loop around, we rumbled and bumbled through a lot of uncut grass to get back to another parking lot that got us in the right direction. And until we got back to our nicer part of the complex, we scurried quickly past every trash recepticle.

What's interesting here is that there are numerous Dumpsters in the older part of the complex. They are located under the various car ports. However in our newer part, there is only one. It's this giant beast of a compactor. You open the squeaky door, heave stuff in there (I throw stuff in there as hard as I can so it slams off the back wall and echos loudly ... it's even better if there's glass that breaks. Remember we're in a red state. So we don't recycle here.) and after every few openings/closings the thing automatically compacts. It's funny because it draws so much amperage to compact that the street lights around it go out when it starts up.

I haven't seen a coon since Machi and I were walking aimlessly around our hotel in Miami back in 2001. That one was also hanging around the trash.