Dangerous Encounters

I have successfully made it through the third week of grad school and I am absolutely loving it. I love the subject matter, the teachers and the people in my classes. Ok...I like most of the people in my classes. I've already given a 15 minute presentation in front of my class, turned in 3 papers and have picked out a research article for a large research paper due in a few weeks. Surprisingly, even though there has been a large workload and I am still working at my job full time, everything has been very manageable. Maybe its because I only have a very limited amount of time, I've had to work more productively or that I just use my time more wisely, but I'm thrilled with what I've been able to accomplish.

Yesterday while I was pulling into my parking space in the garage at school, a girl was walking and past and told me and my friend Lauren that there had been a snake sighted in the garage earlier in the day and to just be careful of where we were walking. Because of this warning, Lauren and I were on high alert when we were walking as we walked back to the garage when our class got out last night.

We were coming up to a set of stairs behind a building when I saw something out of the corner of my right eye behind one of the trees. I thought to myself huh, thats a very large squirrel and all of a sudden that very large squirrel whips around to the side of the tree that we are on and its not at all a very large squirrel, its a really mean raccoon.

The mean raccoon sees us and crouches down into attack mode and starts hissing at us. Suddenly it lunges forward. At that point Lauren and I are screaming and running in the other direction. After a few hundred yards we stop and turn to each other wondering how in the world we are going to get back to our cars. Out of breath and utterly terrified, we logically think that maybe because we were so loud and caused such a commotion, that the raccoon was himself scared off and we began walking back to the garage.

Unfortunately, we were mistaken and the raccoon was not only not scared by the scene that we had caused, but it was emboldened and was waiting for us to return. As soon as he had us in his sights he started running towards us. In true form, Lauren and I again screamed, bolted in the opposite direction and sought refuge from the vicious animal. This search for refuge took us across on overpass into some of the dorms on campus where we found an on duty RA who kindly informed us of an alternative way to get into the garage and reported the deadly animal to the proper authorities.

Lauren and I then made the trek through the dorm to the dorm garage then back across the street on the ground level and then back up 3 flights of stairs to where our cars were only to have to be on the lookout for the snake.

It was an eventful evening.