Racoons and Derivatives

I don't make this stuff up just to have something to blog about. Monday morning we heard a clang in the basement, so Mark went to check it out. Peering at him through a hole in the wall was a racoon. The hole in our wall was the ash chute attached to the chimney. The hole is normally covered by a metal cover. The racoon, and we assume his family, had pushed the cover out with their big booties.

Mark's solution - risk getting rabies and put the metal cover back up and push a shelf against it. My solution would have been animal control, but hey - to each their own. Now we need to get someone out here to boot out our guests. I've been asked if we could just smoke them out. Here are two reasons that won't work.

1. Our fireplace is non-working because the lining of the chimney went bad a million years ago. Lighting a fire to "smoke" out racoons could result in burning the house down.
2. Racoons hide from smoke in the nooks in the chimney. I learned this via google. Chimneys aren't straight and smoke doesn't scare racoons who hide in the bends.

Other bad ideas include. Waiting until the parents crawl out at night and capping the chimney (Mark's idea). Google taught me that the babies would be trapped, die, and stink up my house because babies wouldn't go out at night. Gross. Or, if the mom is trapped outside with her babies inside, she'll tear up our roof trying to get back in. Hmm, I guess we'll have to use pest control.

Okay, enough of the boring stuff - let's talk the fun stuff. DERIVATIVES!! WAHOO!! I just got back from a 3 day conference on derivatives. 24 hours of derivatives, what could be more fun? I'm not a derivative expert, that's why I went to the conference. I think I hung in there well...learned a lot the last three days. It was like a conference of super dorky people. Die-hards. Yup, that's me. Plus the FASB had a person present and do Q&A...that was fun. I submitted a question about their joint project on financial instruments. Yes, super dorky. Love it.