The next night John and I decided to stay up all night and try to catch him in the act. So there I was...in the dark...by myself. My wingman was snoring away in our comfortable bed while I sat in a lawn chair all night getting eaten by mosquitos. (Clearly I'm suffering from a little crybabyitis, I'll stop now) I did go wake him up at 4am for his "shift" which lasted two hours and no racoon. darn...sort of.
That morning I called the company that makes the electric fencing and said "What the heck?" or something like that and the nice lady gave me some great pointers - John and I spent several sweaty hours re-working things and voila' 10,000 volts comin off that sucker. I'm pretty sure we rubbed our hands together and made an evil laughing noise just thinking about that racoon trying to get through THAT! Mwaaahaaaahaaa. Sleepless nights will do that to fairly sane people. So far, so good on the anti-racoon measures.
Why do I have a picture of a gate? I can't even begin to describe how excited I am about this silly gate - up to this point, to get to the left pasture, you would have to go out the fence to the right of our house and walk ALLLLLLL the way around the outer fencing which is like 5 miles (OK, that's an exaggeration but when it's 105, it sure feels like it) so this fence will lead directly out to the fantastic organic vegetable garden that is going in as soon as it less hot than the surface of the sun. Maybe a little rain would be good too. See how our sweet little laying hens are fertilizing for me? Nice.
A few of our rabbits relaxing in the shade of the willow tree during the day. They are all theoretically bred so we'll find out in about 20 or so more days if they actually do breed like...well, rabbits.