Never steal a man's cheetos

I'm still trying to get caught up on my homework, and I have very little motivation to do that. Therefore, updating this blog slips down my priority list.

A few weeks ago, my brother returned from Indonesia, with his girlfriend. I guess they'll be getting married soon, but I don't know for sure. It was also his 30th birthday back in June, so I wanted to treat him to a celebration worthy of turning 30. With the help of my cousins, we coordinated going camping for a few days and basically hanging out in Wisconsin Dells. I'm not sure if this is official, but I think the Dells is the waterpark capital of the Midwest, so there was plenty of things to keep us busy during the day. We spent a whole day at Mt. Olympus theme park which was pretty cool. It used to be 2 smaller parks: Family Land and Big Chief's Go-Cart World. So it combined a sizable waterpark with a go-cart/rollercoaster park, which filled our day very well. They have one coaster, Hades, that's one of the best coasters I've ever ridden. It's a wooden coaster, but it flies... supposedly, it gets up to 70mph, with some pretty wicked dips and curves. But the best part is after the big drop, when track goes completely underground, for the entire length of the parking lot. Pitch black, 70mph, unknown track... sweet.

After hitting up the theme park, we headed back to the campsite, but needed to stop at WallyWorld to pick up a few things. My cousin and I were in charge of getting more snacks, and we were in a "cheesy" mood. (It is Wisconsin, after all.) We already had potato chips, so those weren't appealing. We already had chex mix... So we were basically left with cheetos. My cousin suggested cheese balls, which sounded perfect to me: not hard like regular cheetos, not as big as cheese puffs, still cheesy enough to make your fingers orange for days. So we searched high and low throughout that Wal-Mart for some cheese balls. We were even considering getting one of those 5 lb tubs of balls, but they didn't even have those. For 15 minutes we searched...no luck. So we ended up with cheese puffs and were fairly satisfied with the choice.

So after dinner that night, we were sitting around roasting marshmallows or talking or whatever we were doing and my brother's girlfriend claimed to hear a raccoon. We had heard one the night before, but hadn't seen any evidence of one, i.e. stolen food or ransacking. She then goes near the food, which was all in a screen tent, and declares that a raccoon was near our food, had just grabbed something, and fled the tent. We could now hear a phantom "crinkling" noise making its way away from our campsite. (Kind of like the sound of a bag of food being opened and closed repeatedly.) Hmm... it's never good when someone steals your food, let alone a thief crawling with rabies or whatever. But we were willing to cut our losses... after we found out what the raccoon took. I figured it would go after the marshmallows, since they're sweet and we'd recently been eating them. No...not the marshmallows. Maybe the bread? No...all accounted for. Chips? No... Chex mix? No... Doritos? No... Cheetos? ...crap.

Well, maybe it was the mood we were in at the time, or maybe we just really didn't want to have wasted those 15 minutes in Wal-Mart, but we wanted those cheetos back. So I grab my headlamp, my cousins grab a few flashlights and we start following that "crinkling" sound. He hadn't gone too far...even raccoons can't go far without eating some cheetos. So I started scanning the forest near our campsite, and, sure enough, I notice a pair of beady eyes. The raccoon was just sitting there, about to open the bag of cheetos (using the opening we had already made earlier that night). It looked caught off guard, but didn't run away, probably because I didn't run after it. (One of my goals in life is to never catch rabies.) Seeing that we weren't doing anything but yelling at it, the raccoon reached into the bag, pulled out a cheeto, and proceeded to eat it right in front of us. Cocky little punk, eh? It wasn't as funny as the second time the raccoon snagged a cheeto while we were still standing there. I had to take a picture; it was too funny. But the raccoon continued to sit there, staring at us. My cousin later said it was like the raccoon was watching a movie...sitting there, staring, and eating cheetos. Gimme back my cheetos! Nuts to rabies, I couldn't let that thief taunt us anymore, so I chased after it.

So everyone knows about the 5-second rule, right? Actually, I think it was 10 seconds back in college, but whatever. So how would that rule apply in this instance? The cheetos weren't dumped out of the bag, and the giant rat only ate a couple of them... and we really didn't want to throw away the entire bag just because of that. My parents didn't raise me to waste food. So we kept the cheetos. Of course, we were all nice enough to let my cousin eat the top layer of cheetos the following day, just to make sure there wasn't anything wrong with them. (I'm sure the CDC would not approve of our methods, but it seemed to make sense at the time. What would you do to save some cheetos?)

So after going through all that work to get the cheetos, rescue the cheetos, continue to eat the cheetos, I wish this had a happy ending. My mom heard about our raccoon encounter, and decided to throw the cheetos away! This makes even less sense because I've seen some of the rotting food my mom has eaten just to avoid throwing it away.

The moral of the story is: never tell your mom what you did while camping. She'll throw your cheetos away.