You can't go far in life with a soup can stuck on your head.

This morning I parked my car near the Terraces, farther up the hill and on the other side of the campus from the Park building. I was about to walk to my class when I hear something behind me:

"Excuse me, miss? Miss!"

I turned around, confused, thinking maybe I dropped something. But the girl approaching me was too far away to have seen me do something like that. I could see she was carrying something in her arms, something large enough that she had to use both arms. As she got closer, I realized the little bundle was moving.

She was carrying an animal that had a soup can stuck on its head.

"I was walking back from class to my Circle when I saw this poor thing," she told me. "Would you please give me a ride to CNS?" CNS is the Center for Natural Sciences. "Sure, of course," I told her. She jumped in with her squirming buddy.

I looked at the animal as I pulled out of the parking lot, trying to figure out what it was. It was fat, and had claws like a raccoon. So I asked her if that's what it was. "To be honest, I have no idea what it is," she told me. It wasn't a raccoon because the tail was wrong; we just couldn't tell without seeing its head. And speaking of that, I don't even know how it got its head so far into the can in the first place. Someone must have dropped or thrown the can outside and there was probably food still in it, so the little guy went after it. He really must have shoved because it looked like his head was too big for the can -- after all, it was stuck on pretty tight.

The girl's name is Kate, and I learned she is a bio major with a specialty in small mammals. So the critter couldn't have been found by a more perfect person. I brought her down to the CNS loading dock, where she said she would bring the animal inside to a lab. I wished her luck, made sure she got inside, and drove back to the Terraces.

So how was your morning?

(Kudos to Mom for the title of this post.)