Sounds like that fox just needed to check the time before heading out. Must be nice having a bouncer for the coop while your neighbor plays chicken roulette every night.

Did the USB port ever come back to life or is it just gone for good now? I ask because I had a similar thing happen with a cheap drawing glove of all things, the little rubber nubs on the fingers somehow got jammed into my laptop's port and bent the pins inside. Took me a whole evening with tweezers and a flashlight to figure out why nothing would connect anymore. My fix was just using a powered USB hub for everything now, which honestly solved like four other random problems I didn't even know were related. Maybe worth trying before you write off the whole setup, a $15 hub is way cheaper than a new motherboard.