Mom, a lizard is out of the cage!
Well, this was a slodgy April Saturday here on the Planet Ann Arbor. One of those bone-chilling April days where the thermometer says 46 (Fahrenheit) but you have to wear a ski-band, scarf, and little knit gloves and your polartech jacket. And Mouse had some sort of mournful sounding music playing on her iTunes all afternoon. It may not have BEEN mournful. I wasn’t listening to the lyrics at all. It was the harmonic structure that was doing me in.
I did my best today. I ran Roomba through several rooms and I am eye-balling another area but Frooggy & Company will not let me get there… And I did laundry and various little bits of cleaning and de-cluttering and I pre-cooked a few things, sauces and stuff, and actually managed to do just a wee bit of yard work (garbed in polartech with gloves, scarf, and ski-band). But that more or less depressed me. So much to do around here and who the heck has time? Not to mention my black thumb.
A facebook/childhood friend who now lives in the southern tier of states posted that her cat had brought a big green (live) lizard into the house. I know of a cat who does this kind of thing, although I’m not sure I have ever heard of him bringing in a lizard. The only cat that I have direct experience with bringing aminals home was Muksaslooie. He once proudly deposited the legs of Radical Betty’s favorite little red squirrel, one she had trained to eat out of her hand, outside her door.
So. Lizard in the house! Yiiy! When the pet-deprived beach urchins were in 5th and 2nd grade, we obtained five anole lizards. The beach urchins were pet deprived because I actually figured out from having a *beloved* childhood dog that pets were very hard work. And then they died. That plus the fact that neighborhood is suburbia and you have to carry around dog-poop bags was enough to keep me from getting a dog. The GG will not have a cat. He likes birds too much.
Anyway, we had these lizards. Anoles. Anoles are less maintenance than dogs because you don’t have to walk them or anything. But they are high maintenance because they require live food and that means that you have to buy live crickets at the pet store. In a plastic bag. You take the crickets home and release them into the lizard cage and the lizards eat them. Our lizards lived in a cage. The only time they would get out is when somebody left the top off.
So one day. It was June. The Beach Urchins were waiting for my friend Jane to pick them up and take them to the Girl Scout day camp. It was a great low-budget camp where the kids learned how to safely make their own campfires and many other things and it is long gone but that would be a whole ‘nother post. Just before Jane arrived in the driveway, another friend called. This friend, well can I just say it takes her a long time to spit out whatever it is she has to say. We all love her but. So, I was on the phone wishing this woman would get to the point and Jane arrived in the driveway and just then, the Beach Urchins yelled, “Mom, a lizard is out of the cage.” And the fire drill began.
I forget what the heck happened. I’m sure we captured the lizard and the kids got out to the carpool and Jane and I probably laughed our you-know-whats about the whole thing. Just a little slice of life from the Landfill. The photoooo is from Sault Ste. Siberia.
April 17th, 2010 at 6:25 pm
We were on the same brainwave; I mowed the back lawn, did laundry and vacuumed(but no roomba). It’s nearly 70 here, but gray and raining off and on. Mostly off except where Tonya is, which is way closer to the water than I am. Our cat “loves” birds–yuck. I hope she’s getting too old to catch any. I like lizards, but not on the loose in the house.
April 17th, 2010 at 6:30 pm
I thought that pic looked like something from the Soo ……..
April 17th, 2010 at 7:12 pm
I’m positively certain that if a lizard showed itself around here (which they used to do when I was a kid; haven’t seen any for ages) that Mojo would bring it onto the the stair landing and disembowel it. Like he tends to do on numerous occasions throughout any given week. The lizards that used to hang out in these parts (I wonder what happened to them?) would separate themselves from their tails! I remember coming home from school and walking up our driveway and here was a lizard and a short distance away was its tail, uhm, twitching. And crouched between them with the most confused look on his face, was our cat!
April 17th, 2010 at 11:09 pm
She specifies “safely learned to make fires” because our father also taught us to build campfires — sometimes with chemical additives.
April 18th, 2010 at 8:48 am
Commenting on your twitter post in the upper right corner. The full phrase bikers yell is, “Bike back, passing on your left”, but sometimes it gets shortened to “on your left”, or “bike back” or even “BIKE!”. As you know from Mark’s blog, we do a lot of riding in Forest Park, and there are a lot of other people there who ride, run, jog, rollerblade, walk, walk with friends, dogs, strollers, or Ipods, etc. It can be crazy, but hey, everyone’s out enjoying themselves and getting fresh air and exercise. Mostly, I’m just hoping that the person I’m passing will continue in a straight line, and their dog won’t move into or across my path.
When you’re out walking at oh-dark-thirty, I’m sure it’s not crowded. Would you prefer that the bike rider just ride by you without saying anything, possibly startling you as they did, or holler something that you’re trying to process from “a million miles away”? If it’s always or mostly the same rider, holler back, “Hey, what’s your name?, then you can say, “Hi, Mark” from your reverie the next time. Or tell them that you’d rather they just pass you without the warning yell.
April 18th, 2010 at 9:10 am
The bike discussion Pooh is talking about is going on over on Facebook. Bottom line, I love when cyclists warn me that they are approaching from behind. I just wish more of them would warn me earlier (-: And a bell works better than language because when I am walking, I am usually thinking, and I am about a billion light-years away. I regard the biker I sometimes see at 0-dark-30 as a “friend” even though we don’t really know each other. He realized that he was startling me and changed his approach to something that worked better for both of us. Namely, to ring his bell from about a half a block back.
April 18th, 2010 at 10:35 am
I had a cat. I was gone a lot over the road and he missed me. He missed me so much the first time I returned that he left a mouse, dead, on my porch. Then it was a baby bunny next to my chair in the dining room, not dead yet. Then another mouse next to my car door. He actually came to me to get my attention and take me to the “gifts” he had for me. Every now and then, there would be one for me in the garden, placed on a flat rock by the front door.
He was sick with his age and all and I had to have him put down last October.
I never want an animal of any kind inside where I am living again. I am grossed out by the idea of having an animal poop in my house and cleaning up after it, bugs, white cat hair on my clothes, ewwwww…….. Nothing is more disgusting than walking into someones house and “sniff”… ” you have a cat?” Fine if other people want them, and I know my family is running a line of lap dogs and such, but I just don’t like them at all.
April 18th, 2010 at 5:22 pm
Like I mentioned on Facebook, the answer to the bike problem is making streets safe and welcoming enough that bikers can ride there instead of competing with pedestrians for sidewalk space. Everyone is responsible for this, including drivers. In SF it’s not legal to ride on the sidewalk. Motorists are still sometimes nasty to you if you’re on a bike (and we have a lot of bikers here), but actually in general I think people are fairly polite to each other on both sides. It works out okay.