POSSUM SOUP

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"See"

Mom and I had a lovely spa day before meeting my brother and sister-in-law for an early dinner. While we were munching on delicious street tacos, Katrina started telling us about their exciting Saturday. Turns out they have two possums living in their house. The possums had gotten in through the crawl space under the house and then up through hole in the floor under the bathtub. Randy said they'd sprayed them with ammonia. They had poked them. They had yelled at them, but the possums would not budge. Randy was beside himself on how he was going to get those things out from under his bathtub.

The plan for after dinner was for me to go with Randy and Katrina because they were taking me to get my birthday present. We had a couple of hours to kill before we could go get the present, so Randy was like "Great! You can help me get those possums out!" I heard him say this to me thinking he had to be kidding, but he was not. I followed along with his plans only because I just didn't know how to tell him that my biology degree did not qualify me for live animal removal. I'm a microbiologist. I don't deal with anything larger than about 3 cm. Any way, plan A involved Randy putting on welding gloves and handing me the lid to a rubber maid container. Randy was going to reach in through the access panel behind the bathroom (which is in their guest bedroom), grab one of the possums and throw it into the rubber maid container. My job was to throw the lid down onto the container. When we opened the access panel there was only one possum. Randy only needed to grab one possum. This should have made it easier. Here's how that went. 

Yeah, so, reaching in and grabbing the thing was a no go. Plan B sounded a little better. Randy had a trap. We thought we could bait it with some delicious possum food, but the trap couldn't be positioned in front of the door in a way that would ensure the possum would go into the trap and not out and around the room. Plan B got scratched and Katrina and I both thought that Randy was done for the day and ready to call an exterminator when Randy came wandering back in with a length of rope. He then tells us he's going to get the possum to walk through the loop he was making in the rope. Once the possum was partially through, Randy would tug the rope which would sort of lasso the possum. He would then swing the possum into the box where I would throw down the lid. Randy told us this plan and then Katrina and I looked at each other and passed the same brain waves back and forth. Those brain waves said "THIS IS NOT GOING TO WORK!", but Katrina shut the door to the bedroom any way committing us all to this task. So now we were all shut up in this tiny bedroom with a possum. Randy got the lasso ready and then started poking the possum to get him to move to the other side of the bathtub. I was holding the container lid for dear life, ready to use it as a shield for when things went horribly wrong.

Except things did not go horribly wrong. Randy lassoed the possum and swung him up and over into the box. I immediately slammed the lid down on the box and then Randy and I looked at each other with giant round eyes of shock. We had just captured a possum and no one got injured or bit. It was a spectacular. There was no sign of the other possum, so we're hoping that one decided to move on. We took our lassoed possum out to an undisclosed rural location and set him free. I'd like to think that his creepy ass snarly grin was one of gratitude for letting him go. 

We did not eat him.