Corfy's Corner My little corner of the web.

It all started years ago when I was just a little kid. At some event (I think it was a restaurant convention or something... my parents owned a restaurant at the time), I won (I don't remember how) a small stuffed raccoon.

It was probably five or six inches tall, gray, and was sitting up with it's arms and legs straight out forward. It had a little pink tounge sticking out slightly, but it came unglued before too long. I had never owned a stuffed raccoon before, and so I decided to name it Roger (it seemed like a good name for a raccoon).

Roger quickly turned into my favorite stuffed animal. I don't remember being obsessive about him or anything, but I do remember taking him to school on several occasions. He would disappear every now and then, but he was usually found (under my bed, for instance, or stuffed in the couch).

Then, one day, Roger went missing and never "returned." As I said, I don't think I went crazy over it or anything, but as time passed, I gradually stopped trying to find him and accepted him as being lost.

Years later my sister confessed that she thought that Roger wanted to play hide-and-seek. She then decided to "hide" Roger in the bottom of a wastepaper basket underneath some papers. And people think that my sister and I got along when we were children.

Anyway, one of the effects that Roger had on me was he made me like raccoons. I have thought that raccoons are cute for as long as I can remember. I have never really wanted one as a pet or anything, but I started a small collection of raccoon items that has grown over the last few years.

Then, a couple of years ago, I was given another small stuffed raccoon. This one is about 10 inches tall and is brown, but it had the exact same pose as Roger did (even though the rings on the tail are a little less pronounced... but they are more lifelike). I named him "Roger Jr.," but I typically refer to him as "Roger."

Again, I am not obsessive about this new Roger, but it is fun to have him as a connection to my childhood. He mixes in well with the rest of the stuffed animals that we have at home (most of them belong to Gayle).

So, when I started trying to rewrite my webpage a few years back, I felt like I needed a new logo. That was when I decided to use Roger. I took a picture of him and then used a graphics program to color over the picture until I had a cartoon/drawing. I then took two "C"s on top of each other (one larger than the other and made them different colors) as the initials for Corfy's Corner, and put Roger's head on top of them. Then I put everything on a yellow background because early versions of my website had a bright yellow background. Voila! A new logo for my site, which you should see on all of my pages. I recently re-worked the logo using Inkscape, so I now have a scalable vector graphic version of the logo, so if I ever need a billboard sized logo, I'm ready.

The rest of my raccoon collection includes an ornament featuring a family of raccoons, a real stuffed raccoon that I named Rocky, and a plaster raccoon doorstop that I named Can. (Get it? Can Coon!) And, of course, numerous other plush toy raccoons.