Let them eat cake...or krunchee kibbles

   Look!!  A birthday-cake hat!!  Thanks for all the well wishes from all of you to me for my birthday...I plan to go sight-seeing through some other journals this evening, so if you left a comment recently, expect to see me come calling.  Most likely, I'll be borrowing a few eggs here and a cuppa sugar from there, to assemble my cake  , in the literary sense of course...

Sometimes, my journal entries stem from ideas sparked by others' jottings.  In that way, I feel journals can be conversational in tone.  Other times, I just share my own experiences and thoughts.  Like below...

Now, I don't know if y'all know what I mean when I say I have camel crickets, so lemme splain...Camel crickets are sometimes called cave crickets or water crickets or other rather hideously accurate descriptive names.  They are rather gruesome with big ole juicy bodies and well-developed thighs.  These are crickets but they sort of resemble spiders because their lower legs and antennae are spindlee and they move really fast.  BUT they don't crawl, they hop.  Their feet have little dagger-like grips that cling tight to my shirt when I startle one and it jumps only to land on the very beast it was fleeing.

I've lived here for years and have not encountered camel crickets before, but each year and season brings its own abundance of some new critter.  One spring brought lady bugs that bite.  Another summer brought red-ants that boldly marched in formation a la army ants (but with red bodies) that bite and sting.  One fall brought an amazing amount of mud wasps and other hornet looking flying stinging things.

Right now it's the camel cricket. 

I get mice too, but then whatja spect?  I live in the midst of a 200+ acre field, ya know?  It's getting colder, the mice are coming in for the winter...that's a routine thing, the landlord brush-hogs, bales the hay, destroying the mouse homes and they say, "hey!  must be time to move to the winter quarters" and they stake their mice-family spaces...in my ceiling, walls, and such until they get tired of my killing them off.  Then they say, "hey, she's the Hit-beast that gran-pappy told us about" before moving back out and finding safer abodes (probably under my home, which I can deal with alot better than them scurrying about overhead).

Anyway, this morning, there was a camel cricket doing the lazy, one legged stroke in Shaddow's water bowl.  My hypothesis (I donned my thinking cap) was that the critter jumped in there, smelling the water, and could not jump out (cuz its feet with them daggers break the surface of the water instead of allowing it to skate on the surface, using it for a spring (ahem) board).  As you can see, I put alotta thought into this.

So I reach down for the bowl to dump it out, wash it, etc.  The water bowl is one of those slick plastic wider base models that supposed to be stable, can't move it nor tip it over, neither Shaddow nor I.  The manufactors left little raised edges to act as handles so I could move it (Shaddow hasn't figured that out yet, or maybe it's just that she does not really care to move the bowl.  Come to think of it, she is rather smart, I mean why would she want to knock over her water bowl?).

Ok, so I am moving slow and sluggish, cuz it was this morning, and I had just stumbled into the kitchen, eyed Shaddow's dish, which was now a swimming pool for the camel cricket.  All these things are important, because when I curled my fingers under the edges, a furry little field rodent sprinted out from under the dish.

My heart lunged, my brain lurched, the adrenaline dumped, and I flung the dish into the sink (thus freeing the cricket and enabling it to find purchase on the enamalled surface, it sprung outta the sink, clung to me for a moment and then hopped off) .  Now you know how time can stretch and you notice all them little details that would normally be not remarkable because of the fact that mere seconds have elapsed?  My brain was sending out the anti-adrenaline, soothing, "thank god it couldn't bite me" message.

Why, you ask, COULDN'T the mouse bite me?  Gosh, I am SOooooooooo glad you asked.  Cuz clutched in its little sharp buck teeth, stretching its jaws as full as they probably could go, was one nugget of Shaddow's food from the next bowl over.  Wonder the kibble tastes like chicken?

Good thing I did not have a birthday cake to leave sitting out on the counter...lord knows, the mice woulda had a field (snicker) day with that!!