OT--Nasty Cat Toy!

Are'nt QI's special :)

-- Kathy in CA Quilting Stuff:

Hi

Cat toy stories hah... well I've got a corker! Not quite as good as a dead rat, but geting there I think.

Puss, my darling QI has a passion for all things reptile. He tries with the birds, but the multitude of bells on his collar puts that little game on the back foot.

So, I get water dragons, skinks and snakes (as most will be aware, snakes in Australia tend to be of the deadly variety:-). I have a story about a brown snake, but it doesn't work in the telling:-)

So, the best story invovloes a Water Dragon, I could see Puss stalking something and went to investigate. As I got near I could see it was an 18inch long (pretty big) dragon. At the sight of me it took flight and ran as fast as it could, followed by Puss at full tilt.

I managaed to catch hold of Puss and scoop him into my arms just as I reached the tree the Water Dragon had climbed (or so I thought).

Whilst walking back to the house with a very wriggley Puss Cat I caught sight of a twig in my hair out of the corner of my eye. So with a tight hold on Puss, I reached up to pull the twig from my hair, but it wouldn't come. (Aussies, stop squiming :-).

The water dragon had taken flight up the tallest object which happened to be me, not the tree. I have to say, I was not a cool about as I would have like to have been :-)

...Fran...

Reminds me when our old cat "Ali" (as in alley cat) brought home a dead possum. Left it on the doorstep for me and sat there proudly. I nearly hurled (I was 6 months pregnant). He obviously thought he was being good and providing for his mama. Try as I might I couldn't find the head though. Yeuch. Thankfully Merlot (Current QI) is much more ..... er.....restrained.

But he was so proud of himself, right? I was never sure whether mine was trying to elicit praise or to teach me how to do it! And it was always one from out in the stone wall, not the ones living in the attic.

Betty in CT

Um, for us yanks that don't know any better...what's a water dragon???

Larisa

Dumpl> Hi

Merlot is the most beautiful kitty in the world - and he knows it. I usually sit on the bathroom floor while the girls are in the tub. Merlot has taken to coming in and sitting on my lap for his dose of "lovin'". He occasionally goes out first thing in the morning (to sun himself on the new back deck), in the late afternoon (to take advantage of the sun on the porch of the girls cubby house) and then just before bed (to commune with his girlfriend who is an adorable chocolate siamese kitten over the back fence). Other than that he lives life indoors - on the daybed, on the dining chair or right in that patch of sunlight behind the stereo! Anything more than a walk is considered disdainful - and as for playing "kitty games"? Forgedaboudit! Too much effort!!

I don't think your QI wold be welcome around here then, we have a couple of Eastern Water Dragons living outside the back fence on the creek bank plus a couple of geckos around the house and numerous skinks. They help a lot to keep the bugs away, so I don't mind them even when they get inside!

Hi

Puss is pretty good. He has only killed a couple of skinks in the whole time we've had him (2 years)

Most pressys he brings me are whole, intact and alive.

I intersede when I get the chance. It stops nasty accidents happening!

...Fran...

When we lived in Corpus Christi, we went to the beach often (probably why I have had to have several skin cancers removed this year). Usually we rigged a tarp from our '67 VW bus (no, we were not hippies) out as far as it would go to provide shade. Arriving home, we hosed it down, folded it loosely in half, and draped it to dry over a horizontally growing mesquite branch which was just above eye level for me. A couple of evenings later, I pulled it down to put it away. Unfortunately it had provided a refuge for hundreds of cockroaches. They flew onto me and crawled all over. I did not remain calm.

Let me explain for those of you who live in temperate regions. There are ordinary house roaches, which most people think of when the word "roach" is mentioned. They are little long brown things maybe half or three-quarters of an inch long. Nasty enough to go along with, but they don't compare to these tree roaches. In the hot, steamy subtropics -- and I suppose in the full tropics, too -- where palm and banana trees abound, you will find tree roaches. They are two or three inches long and maybe an inch wide. They fly. You do NOT want to have one fly into you.

I had a professor who came to Corpus Christi State University from someplace in Tennessee. He spent half of a class one time raving about his first encounter with one of these roaches. He and his wife thought a bat had got inside. What he didn't know was that they have legs with feet like six straight pins pincering onto tender skin. And they crawl into your hair. And they get inside your clothes. And your family is so far from sympathetic that they laugh at the sight and talk about it for years: Remember the time that Mom got those roaches all over her?

I showered and shampooed and brushed my teeth (one got in my mouth during the screaming) three times before my not so DH said it was enough, already!

I didn't read Kafka's "Metamorphosis" until after that watershed event, and I never felt that the rest of the class could truly understand the complete nastiness of the protagonist's change.

Nell in Austin

This is because you took away the frog!

Prolly!

My skin is crawling. Our first apartment, although unfurnished did come with cockroaches! When I found one in our son's crib I said ENOUGH! Time to move... All the way to Phoenix. Some made the trip in the packing but died enroute. Anything with their filthy little bodies in it was thrown away. Yuck!

A small lizard that looks like a gecko.

That's what you get for stealing his frog toy.