The rewards of going solar.

So I'm packing for Burning Man, down to the wire, with the Community Truck being loaded in slightly over 24 hours. My Foot Photography Booth (now a communications pod of the Foot People of the planet Pedon) is running through a 12V charge controller. I didn't intend to use my solar panels this year, I was only using the controller for the low-voltage cut-off feature so my batteries don't get sucked into oblivion ("Please, Vivian! Please!") However, at the very last minute, I realized that 1) My batts may not last more than a day without a recharge and 2) All I had to do go solar was simply plug my panels into the controller. So I did. And not *only* is the entire system Off the Grid, but wrapped around one of the terminals of the panels was my *Burning Man Checklist from last year!*

Fuck yeah. The Universe rewards.

The Return of the Mangey Possum!

...so I'm taking a break from packing to play with the Loki-dog, we're running around outside, and I hear:

"Peep!"

I look around for the source of the peeping, and am confronted by an adorable nature-special baby animal right in the middle of the yard. I think "that looks like a baby possum!"

I then hear a hissing noise from the direction of the cage I've had set up in front of a hole in my shed for weeks, and it appears that the momma possum, with several more cuties clinging to her chest, agrees that it's a baby possum.

HER baby possum.

I shoe Loki away, get a towel, and pick up Junior. I head over to the cage, shove him through the bars toward Momma, and then get some water. Several time I get snapped at in the process.

Possums have BIG jaws!

So now, on the eve of panic packing for Burning Man, I have to decide what to do with my new menagerie. The strong temptation is to let them go back to living under my shed, but they are almost *certainly* the source of my continued flea problem.

So, I think I'll go with the standard protocol of dropping the possum, literally kit and kabootle, off at the Greenbelt spot where I usually divest myself of unwanted flea-generating members of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. I'm sure there will be some risk to the babies, which sucks, but it's better than having them grow up to have fond memories of filling my yard with fleas, and it's *definitely* better than listening to them die screaming when I board up all the holes in the shed and fill it full of borax.