Cricket Watch

I seem to have gotten in a pattern of posting something to my blog about every three months or so. Excuses aside, I'm just going to jump right back in and hope that I don't go another three months without a post. (Honestly, I don't think I will -- in fact I know I won't, given the fact I have a major topic that is going to take a LONG time to write about of a LONG series of posts - the topic I promise is not about crickets)

Anyway, "Cricket watch?" you ask?

There's this cricket that has been my nemesis for about a week now. He lives outside the window closest to me in the bedroom and starts chirping about 11pm each night.

He's annoying.

He'll start up randomly throughout the night -- and just as randomly will stop. He always seems to know when I'm trying to figure out where he is.

He knows exactly what he's doing.

He's waking me up - at 1:30 am, 3 am, 5 am. At times when I really don't want to be woken up.

I'm one of these people that really enjoys my sleep. I've been knowing to turn sleeping into an art form. I slept through Hurricane Hugo. There's not much that can wake me up.

Except this stupid little cricket.

The first couple nights, I really thought he was in the room he was so loud. I checked one corner where I thought the sound was coming from. Then it would stop for a moment -- and start back up from what sounded like the other corner of the wall with the window. Chirp, search, repeat.

I eventually realized he was living right outside the window. He is just one really loud little bugger.

Last night during a lull in the rain we had had most of the evening, he started chirping again around 11:30. So I went outside and unloaded the household Ortho pump spray I have all over the ground, foundation, wall and window. I was hoping he would get the message and leave.

No such luck.

About an hour later he started up again. And woke me up at least twice that I can recall throughout the night. Once I was up, he just continued to chirp for the rest of morning while my wife and I got ready for church.

My wife says she can't hear him. But for some reason I can't tune him out.

So tonight, right around 11:30, he was at it again.

But I had an extra special present for him tonight. I bought one of those bottles of exterior pest Ortho that attaches to the hose and proceeded to saturate the ground outside the bedroom, the entire exterior wall, the bushes, the eaves, and the window frames with it.

It's 1:15 am right now. He's been quiet so far tonight since I sprayed his hangout down. That's a good sign that maybe he got the message and has decided to hop down the road permanently and annoy someone else.

In the meantime, I'm strategizing my next step in case he is just hiding or playing dead. If Cricket Watch goes into a third night, I am going to be really perturbed.

Either way, game on pal.

Think Bathing a Baby Is Fun? Try A Cat

Ever tried to bathe a cat? It's not a whole lot of fun. For anyone involved.

We have three cats -- two that are eleven, both of which are long-haired (one tortoise shell calico - Dorry; one black persian- Dexter); and one tuxedo-colored short-haired (Mittens, who I affectionately call Demon) that we took in as a stray last year around Thanksgiving.

The two older cats are declawed; the new one isn't. So we trim her nails. She puts up a helluva fight when we do -- so during the first few times, we got scraped up a good bit. But she's calmed down lately. We don't have to worry as much about putting battle armor on when we cut her nails anymore.

But we think Dorry is picking up some of Demon's bad habits.

Dexter and Demon are pretty good about keeping themselves up. Dorry never has been. I think she has some mental issues. She's always been kinda weird. She gets mats in her hair a lot. And she likes to hang out in the litter a lot. She would literally just sit there all day long if she could.

So anyway, getting to the point of the story here... It was time yesterday for the cats to be combed.

Dexter doesn't like it, but he took it like a man.

Dorry fought tooth and nail the entire way. She's never fought us like she did yesterday. I came away with a pretty interesting cat bite and my wife with some pretty bad scrapes on her arm. Eventually we wrapped her legs in a towel and did our best to comb her. The whole time I was combing her, I realized she just stunk. I mean, she just smelled really bad.

We decided while she was already in a bad mood that she was going to get a bath. This is always fun. I don't know what other people have to go through when they bathe their cat(s). Most people think that we're crazy that we bathe our cats when we tell them about it anyway. But Dorry does not like to take a bath at all.

Getting her into the water usually involves carrying her into the bathroom in such a way that she doesn't see the water until she's standing in it. We've tried walking her face first toward the tub before and she freaks out. She will kick, scream, and wail like you wouldn't believe.

Once she got into the water she just kept on wailing. She looks up with this expression as if she's saying "Why have you brought this upon me?" and just continues to wail. You try and put some shampoo on her and she squirms and wails the entire time. When you rinse her, she squirms and wails the entire time.

Eventually, she accepts her fate. But this usually takes about 10 minutes. So we eventually managed -- and she got through it fine.

The funniest thing though was when I flipped the drain switch and the water started to drain. She heard the water start to go down and watched it slowly get lower and lower and she tried to bolt right from the tub to avoid getting sucked down. In the end, there was a tub full of residual bubbles with this cat that looked like a water-logged rat standing in the middle.

She has so much fur that when she's dry she looks 2-3 times her actual size. She's really a skinny cat; you don't really know it until she's wet. We toweled her off as best as we could and tried to get her to stay in one place with a towel, but she refused to sit down. She went back to the door to the room where the litter is and just stared at the door. I was not about to let her in there to go sit down in the litter and get it all through her fur. I knew that's what her plan was.

Four hours later, the dry, clean cat was allowed access to her litter. I guarantee you she'll be reeking of it in just a few days.

Nestled in the Eaves

A few weeks ago, I noticed some miscellaneous weeds and twigs stuffed in the eaves above our porch. Over the weeks, the pile grew and grew.

We had ourselves a bird's nest.

My wife and I kept wondering -- Should we let a bird do that above our porch? How safe a location is that for a bird? Why did a bird pick that, of all locations, to build a nest? Should we get rid of it?

I decided to leave it be. I figured if a bird really wants to live above our porch, fine. Just as long as it doesn't poop on me.

This past weekend we heard the first microchirps. As my wife works for a state agency that gets the week of July 4th off, she's been home all week long listening to the chirps. She's called me up at work a time or two, saying "They're chirping again."

They're birds -- that's what birds do.

I saw the little muchkins for the first time yesterday. There are at least four of them, but only three at the most want to stick their heads up at any one time. I'm not sure what type of birds they are --- the mother is never really around long enough or visible enough for me to tell.

Baby birds are not the most attractive creatures on Earth. I tried taking some pictures of them. Most of the photos turned out kinda blurry - the camera doesn't like being that close to them.

The images I ended up with made the birds look like either the famous hoax profile of the Loch Ness monster, or some sort of demonic gray blob with a beak and mohawk.

I never realized that baby birds have as much hair as they do. It's kinda freaky.

I came in the house and told my wife about them, showed her the photos, and told her their names are Huey, Dewey, Louie, and Clyde. She promptly told me that I'm weird.

So we've been doing some reading up on birds. Apparently they will start trying to leave the nest and fly away in about two weeks. So until then, I guess we'll keep an eye out for them.