Cleaning Out My Cell Phone

So over the past two or three years, I've been in a morbidly depressed funk (which I'm just now starting to emerge from) and mostly keeping to myself.  But all along I've been taking photos on my cell phone, and I've only been able to share them recently, after I figured out that the only way to get the photos from my cell phone to this computer would be to upload them from my phone to Google Drive, then to download them from Google Drive to my PC.  Whatever works, I reckon.

So what the heck has been going on in my life?  I guess I might as well show y'all, right?

Stay tuned; I have to upload them to my website right quick....

At some point while I was toiling my life away at Sears that day, something — most likely a coyote or a large dog — broke into my rooster run and killed all three of my roosters: Mister Poopsie, Panic and Burglar.  


Three photos of Burglar's feathers, inside and outside the rooster run.  Apparently he was the only one who made it over the fence in a bid to escape their attacker.  It didn't do much good; the predator ran back out of the pen and caught him anyway.  But as testified by the multiple scatterings of feathers, Burglar did not go down quietly.


I never found Burglar's carcass; it would seem that the intruder carried him off to be eaten somewhere else.  But Panic was lying right where the beast had killed him, bitten to death but otherwise intact.



Same with Mister Poopsie.  

Most predators kill only what they intend to eat, and nothing more.  I've interrupted hawks and eagles in the middle of pinning down, killing or eating one of my chickens, with the bird of prey completely ignoring all the other hens or roosters as they stand around screaming, squawking and otherwise raising the alarm (which is usually what brings me storming out of the house with my Swiss Arms TG-1 air rifle in hand).  Same with opossums, raccoons and stray cats; if I don't catch them, they always just eat one chicken and leave without doing further harm.  So whatever it was that killed Mister Poopsie and Panic did so out of sheer orneriness, or at best killed them for sport, not out of need.  And to me, that is simply unforgivable.



I found the predator's poop too.  It didn't look like normal dog droppings, more like wolf scat.  But we don't have any wolves in this part of Texas, so my money says "coyote".



The breech where the alleged coyote broke into the rooster run.  I really should have done a better job of building a proper fence here.

Ever since then, I've been harboring a "kill on sight" policy regarding any stray dogs or coyotes which I find on my property.  No more shooting dogs in the butt just to scare them off; now I aim for the heart, the neck or the temple and I do my best to make each shot a kill shot, because if a predator finds your chickens once, then the predator can find them again any time after that.  It's best to put the predator in a shallow grave and be done with it.  And Texas' conservation laws can take a flying leap through a doughnut hole if even one word of them says that I can't protect what's mine.


Day Rating:

Bad (2/4 Frowns)

I loved Mister Poopsie, too.  He was the youngest son of Pepper (who was my best rooster ever), and he got his name when I had to save his life by taking an eyedropper and some warm water and removing a colon blockage when he was just a two-week-old chick.  He almost died because he couldn't poop, but I fixed that.  He was such a well-behaved boy, too.  I still think about him and his father sometimes.  

More to come!

I caught this humungous Texas rat snake in my henhouse while it was trying to swallow Hurdles, one of my month-old pullets (who had earned her name from jumping the gate several times, even after I had trimmed her wings).  It turns out that despite her skill at escaping chicken runs, she wasn't much good at escaping predators.  The snake had Hurdles in its mouth all the way up to her shoulders when I came walking in, and it was kind of funny how the snake just slowly backed off and unswallowed Hurdles while I was shining my light on it, as if to say, "Why, no, I wasn't eating one of your chickens!  Not me!  Why do you ask?"

Hurdles was already dead, alas.  I couldn't save her.  But at least the snake didn't last much longer than that.

Day Rating:

Meh (0/4 Smiles or Frowns)

On one hand, I lost one of my pullets, and I liked her too (despite her unruliness).  On the other hand, I got the bastard that killed her, plus the snake's "Oops, I'm busted" reaction was pretty funny.

There's more than just dead animals on my phone, I promise!  I just had to get this one done before heading off to work.  See you in twelve hours!

Okay, one more photo before I go to work!


My mother raises ducks.  She adores the hens, but she's not so fond of the drakes (or whatever the hell you call a male duck).  So she dumped two of her boys into my chicken run for me to care for.  They were idiots, and they were kind of amusing, so I named the calm one Abbott and the rambunctious one Costello.  Mom eventually took Abbott and Costello back, and they were a bit of a pain in my butt, but my boarder Lisa adored them too.


Day Rating:

Nice (1/4 Smiles)

If you can't laugh at ducks, what can you laugh at?  

My obnoxious, undisciplined, ADD-afflicted nephews Drew and Alex were down in Texas staying with Mom and Dad, and I was invited.  Oh, joy of joys. 

So naturally, I went over and spent some time tormenting Mom's ducks (again...as usual)....



...then I took Dad's air rifle and, with a single shot to the heart, I dropped this big, chunky, well-fed squirrel out of a tree in their front yard.  Too bad I still haven't learned how to clean and cook squirrels...not that there's much meat to them anyway.  But this one might have been the exception.  As it was, I just tossed the squirrel into the lake and let the turtles have her.  Turtles will eat anything.



Then because the boys were getting on everyone's nerves, Mom, Dad and I decided to opt for the "divide and conquer" approach: Mom and Dad got Alex for the evening, and I got Drew.  So I took Drew to Pizza Hut for some Triple Meat and Cheese pizza and Mountain Dew.  He ate two slices and passed out without even touching his Dew.

Wuss.

I ate the rest, of course.  No way I'm letting good pizza go to waste!  I can always just get on my elliptical and burn it off later!


Day Rating:
     
Nice (1/4 Smiles)

I hate having to spend time with my nephews, but the pizza was good and ducks are fun.  And did you see the size of that squirrel?  That was a pretty nice squirrel, wasn't it?  Pow!  One shot, one kill.  No exceptions.  

So right next door to our local Dairy Queen (inside which I was sitting when I took this photo), there used to be a good, authentic Mexican restaurant named Two Señoritas.  I ate there fairly often, and their burritos with green salsa were the greatness.  Then I guess something or another happened, and it was bad, and Two Señoritas closed their doors.

That was about two years before this photo was taken.  So I had some mixed emotions when I sat down with my Hungr-Buster burger and a side of Jalitos, looked out the window and saw this.  On one hand, that's it.  Two Señoritas is never coming back.  The family gave up on their business, and it's gone.  On the other hand, that old building was getting a bit dated, and if the new owner is someone who has enough money to buy a commercial lot, demolish the building there and build a completely new one in its place?  Oh, yeah...whatever business opens its doors there next, it's going to be something big, and it's going to be something nice.

Stay tuned on that one.  


Day Rating:

Meh (No Smiles or Frowns)

Out with the old, in with the new.  Bittersweet moments like this are always hard to define, aren't they?  

The day of the infamous Copperhead bite!

Well, it was the day after the night of the infamous Copperhead bite, actually.  And on that night, it was right around 9 PM when I was coming out of the carport when I heard something in the piles of leaves along our fence there.  It sounded something like if you stacked a few narrow strips of paper and slipped them into a running box fan, or like a cicada or some other insect with large wings had fallen into the leaves and was trying to flutter its way back out.  So I came back with a flashlight, shined it on the leaf pile and didn't see what was causing the noise (though the noise was still chopping along...), so like a perfect goddamned idiot I reached down with my bare left hand to rake some of the leaves aside and try to expose the source of the noise.

In my defense, I had never heard a Copperhead's warning hiss in all my life before that.  Hell, I didn't even know that Copperheads have a warning hiss, let alone that their "hiss" sounds more like someone feeding strips of paper into a running box fan!  The onomatopoeia for a noise like that would go something like "hhThhThhhhTTTT!"  You call that a hiss?

The damnedest thing about copperheads is their camouflage; put a copperhead in a pile of dead leaves and it's very hard to see him.  I didn't even see the copperhead before I felt the deep, stabbing sting just behind the fingernail in my left ring finger; I yanked my hand away and suddenly there he was, reared up and staring right at me.  It wasn't fear that gripped me in that moment, oh, no.  It was anger, it was indignation, maybe even a creeping hint of rage.  "How dare you violate my person like that, you filthy reptile?!?"  So despite all medical advice saying that you should calm down and settle down after you've been bitten by a venomous snake, I ran into the house, ran right back out with my repeating air rifle fully loaded and ready to go (like I always keep it when I'm not using it) and went right back to the same leaf pile, looking for that snake.  "All right...where are you?  Where are you, you little bastard?"  "hhTTThhTThhTTThhhTTTT!"  "THANK YOU!!!"  And then I planted the muzzle against the top of his head and drove five pellets through his skull in rapid succession.  Then I allowed myself to sit down on the stoop, relax (with the rifle across my lap and the dead snake draped across the barrel) and call 911. I also called my Dad, because 1) he also used to be a paramedic, and 2) he's my father and he should probably know about these things.

The perk about giving in to the Dark Side of the Force and killing that snake was that I had something to show Dad and the paramedics when they rolled up at the house.  My little tiny snake was obviously a juvenile copperhead, but one thing that the paramedics enlightened me on was that young copperheads can be more dangerous than older copperheads because juveniles will give you everything they have in their venom sacs when they strike.  it's not until they grow older that copperheads get the sense to regulate their venom, using only a little in each bite and saving the rest for later.  Sometimes, older copperheads won't even inject their venom at all; they'll just dry-bite you as a warning to back off, then save all that venom for the rats that they plan on eating later down the road.  (You should still clean out the bite wound and get some antibiotics on it, dry-bite or not; you don't know what bacteria that snake's teeth picked up from the last rat he ate, after all.)

As the photo shows, the paramedics and the nurses took turns tracing the edge of the swelling with magic marker, as well as jotting down what time it was when they traced that swelling.  When the ambulance showed up at my house, the swelling was only up to the third knuckle on my ring finger.  By 9:23 (during the ambulance ride), the swelling had grown past the finger and into the metacarpal region; when they were bringing me into the ER (circa 9:38), the swelling was well into the meat of my hand.  I mean, we're talking about swelling; there could have been a golf ball hidden between my metacarpals and no one would have known!  Nasty stuff.

So the nurses hit me with six vials of CroFab antivenom, but the swelling continued to grow for a bit longer, though it did slow down quite a bit; it reached my elbow around midnight before it finally started to back down.  By 5:45 the next morning, the swelling had receded to about a third of the way down my forearm.  As of this photo's snapping, my hand and ring finger were still pretty puffy, but I was on the mend.  I was feeling fine and dandy by the next day, but they still held me for another day after that.

So all in all, that one fleeting moment of unwariness came with a pretty big price tag: $210 for saline, antibiotics, several hits of morphine throughout the night, and whatever other ER meds they pumped into me.  $400 for some surgeon to glance at my hand and tell me that I wasn't going to lose the finger (...as if I couldn't have figured that out for myself).  $2,200 for the ambulance ride, and $3,600 for three days in the hospital.  And I didn't have medical insurance because thanks for nothing, Walmart!

I'm just too lucky that I got a charity to eat the $84,000 price tag on those six vials of CroFab.  Seriously.  Google "CroFab price per vial".  That stuff's horribly expensive!

That little copperhead's still lying in my freezer, waiting for the day when I'll get around to thawing him out and turning him into a new hatband for my duster hat (yes, that one).  That hat and its hatband will become THE most expensive accessory that I've ever owned.


Day Rating:

Bad (2/4 Frowns)

It was an easily avoidable misfortune (so I'll be kicking myself for that for years to come...), and the financial impact will leave me in the hole for at least another two years.  But at least the episode had its benefits:

1)  I now know what a copperhead's warning hiss sounds like.  It wasn't four months later that I went into the workshop after dark, turned on the lights and immediately heard that noise again.  I didn't even have to turn my head to know that it was another damned copperhead, and when I did turn my head to look, it was a big copperhead, a three-footer reaching up the side of my toolboxes.  So I calmly yet briskly hustled back into the house, came back with my break-barrel Swiss Arms TG-1 (because the RepeatAir had sprouted a massive CO2 leak in the firing mechanism and I didn't trust it anymore) and, from a safe distance, put two shots through the copperhead's head without hesitation.

He's still in my freezer next to the snakeling that bit me.  I might turn him into a belt one of these days.


2)  I got a cool story out of it.  Copperhead venom can cause permanent nerve damage and/or tissue damage, and yes, it can even kill you; once that stuff gets into your kidneys, you're a goner.  But unless you're a little kid and/or the copperhead bites you right on the flank, the odds of dying from a copperhead bite are actually pretty remote.  But still, there's a chance.  So hey, how many other people do you know who can say "I survived being bitten by a pit viper" without lying?  That's right: me.  Me, homeboys.  Bow down to the American Crocodile Dundee, mates!  

For our friends Down Under, yes, I'm well aware that while the American Copperhead is from the Pit Viper family, the Australian Copperhead is from the Cobra family.  Same name, two completely different venomous snakes.  And I wouldn't recommend getting bitten by the Australian variety, no matter how cool of a story it would make.  But at least that snake's hiss doesn't sound like a damned electric fan eating a damned cardboard box!

At risk of making myself sound creepy-stalker-ish, that woman in the blue shirt with her back turned to us is Tamara, one of the Assistant Managers at the Walmart where I used to work.  And she's an absolute sweetheart.

My time at Walmart was kind of a roller-coaster.  It was okay when I started off and they put me in Dairy; Jess (Dairy's Department Manager) and most of the other Dairy workers got along great with me.  Then Walmart cut my hours (and therefore, my paychecks) in half by that December, and things were bad but tolerable.  Then I got promoted up to Sporting Goods, I got more hours and an extra dollar per hour on my paychecks, and Walmart was great.  And then just a few months later, I scanned the wrong barcode on a hunting rifle that I was selling to a customer, and even though it was an easily fixed mistake of no consequence, Walmart is absolutely pants-pissing terrified of the spectre of the BATF looming over their shoulders.  And even though there's a very huge degree of separation between an honest mistake (like scanning the wrong barcode) and a criminal action (like selling a rifle and ammunition to a convicted felon), Walmart kicked me out of Sporting Goods and knocked me all the way down to People Greeter.

People Greeters are the butt monkeys of Walmart.  The People Greeter position itself is an Island of Misfit Toys where Walmart careers go to die.  Every People Greeter at my Walmart — myself included — had become a People Greeter after getting demoted from something else.  Wes?  Started off in Automotive.  Couldn't hack it because no one would train him to do the job.  Got demoted to People Greeter.  Sara?  Started off in Toys.  Couldn't reach up and put Barbie dolls on the high pegs anymore after she developed emphysema.  Got demoted to People Greeter.  Kay?  Started off as a Cashier.  Turns out she couldn't handle numbers very well, and she handled them even worse during the hectic Lunch Rush.  Got demoted to People Greeter.  Mason?  Started off as a cart pusher...pardon, "Courtesy Associate".  Had an undiscovered heart condition which decided to make itself known after the physical exertion of pushing entire columns of shopping carts around a parking lot for eight hours a day.  Got demoted to People Greeter.

It kind of paints a different picture of those grinning, blue-vested people who offer you a shopping cart when you walk into a Walmart, doesn't it?  They're not nearly as happy as you think.

And because People Greeters are Walmart's unforgiven and unforgiveable little failures, every other employee gets to boss the People Greeters around.  Cashier Associates, Pharmacy Associates, Bakery Associates...hell, the friggin' cart pushers get to boss the People Greeters around!  The management doesn't see People Greeters as being mission-essential (even though they're each individual store's first line of Public Relations), so whenever a manager needs an extra warm body anywhere in the store — from Homelines to Lawn & Garden to Maintenance to another damned cart pusher to whatever — you just know that a People Greeter is going to get suckered into doing it!  And whenever one of those impossible-to-satisfy anger-management-case customers stomps into the store with a mile-wide chip on her shoulder, guess which employee she belches fire on first.

Most of the management is so high up in the ivory tower that I'm surprised that they could even trouble themselves to descend from On High for just long enough to use me to wipe their asses.  And then there was Tamara, one of the pinpricks of light during my trudge through the Slough of Despair that is the People Greeter position at Walmart.  As if I needed any more proof that she was always there in the trenches with us blue-vested lemmings, I snapped this photo of her working a cash register on a day when we were short on cashiers.  I'm pretty confident in saying that she's the only manager in that store who would deign to work as a cashier even after putting on a manager's nametag.  It's always refreshing to see someone who still remembers being on the ground no matter how high up the ladder they've climbed.

Tamara's still there (even though I'm not) and we always have more than a few kind words to swap every time we meet.  Last time that happened was about three months ago, when she was working the evening shift, I went to Walmart after my day at the prison and I yammered on about the inmate who sneaked some ice past me in Strip Search (while explaining that "ice" is the purest form of crystal meth; I kind of feel like I damaged a little of her innocence there).

Now that I think about it, I have never once seen Tamara frustrated, sad or angry!  How Tamara keeps up with the cheery tone and the bright smile despite slugging it out at Walmart for years is beyond me.  I guess even a fresh-faced suburban mother can have more intestinal fortitude than a prison guard if the gods smelt her and forge her just right.


Day Rating:

Nice (1/4 Smiles)

Tamara's great.  Enough said.  

My Sugar Baby watermelon vines were actually starting to fruit for once. And I took a photo of that.


Day Rating:

Nice (1/4 Smiles)

I'm growing watermelons, baby! Yeah, booyah!!!

Lisa bought a tiny little kiddie pool for Abbott and Costello.  I told you she liked those ducks....  

I suppled the bricks that the ducks could use to climb up into the pool, and they could still barely clamber up onto those bricks.  One thing that makes Peking ducks even more useless is that they have no vertical ascent ability.  If you surround a duck with parking curbs, he's trapped and he's easy pickings for the next eagle, wolf or bobcat who comes along.  Why haven't these noisy, fat, waddling, slow-moving objects gone extinct yet?

Oh, yeah...because of us humans caring for them, that's why.  I'm pretty sure that my mother alone is responsible for at least 80% of the Peking ducks in North America surviving to maturity.  Good job, Mom!  

See those white plants just to the left of the kiddie pool?  Those are Dusty Miller plants.  I liked those Dusty Millers.  They were in the back yard for years, sprucing up the place, and Abbott and Costello ended up killing them.  I never did get around to kicking each duck in the butt for doing that.


Day Rating:

Nice (1/4 Smiles)

Yeah, they killed my Dusty Millers, but they were still some silly, oddly adorable Mother Hubbards.  And they liked the kiddie pool a lot.  

After years of killing any raccoons who had dared to threaten, harm and even kill my chickens, I finally decided to skin one and make a pelt out of it.

I had read up on several taxidermy and hide preservation sites beforehand, so I had everything I needed.  I hung the freshly killed raccoon carcass upside-down by its hind legs (and by a pair of large treble hooks which I'd linked onto a pair of fence chains hanging from the roof of my metal shed), then I used a razor blade to make a pilot cut around the anus.  It's crucial to be very careful at that part; puncture any part of an animal's digestive tract — anus and colon included — and you could foul the entire carcass.

But I'm too skilled and too precise for that, so I followed the pilot cut with my hunting knife.  Then I cut a ring around each hind ankle, and then, using my hunting knife's gut hook, I sliced all the way down from the anus ring to each ankle ring.  I even cut along the underside of the tail, just to make the tail fur easier to pull off of the tail vertebrae and everything else inside the tail.  And after that, I started a new cut at the anus ring and ran it up across the belly (taking care not to cut too deeply...again, never nick the intestines) and across the center of the chest, stopping at the base of the neck.  And then you cut a ring around each of the two foreleg ankles, and then, starting from the raccoon's breastbone, you make another cut from the center cut to the left foreleg ankle.  Repeat for the right foreleg ankle.

After that, well, there are several things you could do from this point, depending on how much fur from the raccoon's head you want in your pelt.  I was content to have none, so I just cut around the base of the neck; that's the easiest way to go.  Hey, it was my first time skinning anything.  I wasn't about to go jumping into Nightmare Difficulty just yet.

After that, I peeled the skin off the carcass (which I left out for the crows), I stretched the pelt across my scraping board and, with a 6-inch plastic paint scraper, I scraped all the fat and other random viscera off the inside of the skin.  Once that was done, I submerged the pelt in a five-gallon bucket of my tanning solution (5 gallons of water, 2 cups of alum and 2 cups of pickling salt; mix well while the water's hot and let it cool), sealed the bucket and...well, I kind of forgot about it.  

(I finally opened that bucket after the pelt had been soaking in it for over a year — well beyond the recommended two to three days — and the pelt was just caked with white stuff so heavy that it just tore the pelt to pieces as soon as I tried to lift the pelt out.  So I just dumped the whole thing back in the pasture.  I still see those tufts of raccoon fur whenever I go walking back there.  That fur's never going to rot away...which is the whole point of soaking it in tanning solution in the first place, I suppose.)


Day Rating:

Nice (1/4 Smiles)

It's always cool to try out new hobbies and seek out new experiences!  Sure, I bungled the raccoon pelt in the end, but I did it for science!  

So Sandie (who worked the Toys department at the Walmart where I used to work) had three cockerels that she didn't need, and since more than one person has looked to me and my home as a Rooster Sanctuary of sorts, I gladly spared them from the chopping block and took them in.  The two bearded Easter Eggers I named Burnside and Van Buren, and I think I named the other one Booster.  And after losing all of my roosters in that random coyote attack three months prior, I was delighted to have some chicken boys again.

But alas, it wasn't meant to last.  I came out to the rooster run every night after I got them, just to make sure that they were roosting for the night.  But these three knuckleheads would be outside, perched on the fence after twilight!  I would grab them off the fence and carry them into the rooster house, and the next night they would be back on the fence again!  After five nights of that nonsense, I threw in the towel.  "Fine!  You want to roost on the fence?  Roost on the fence!  But when an owl carries one of you off, you'll be sorry!"

Well, the God of Poetic Justice must have heard my warning to those three stupid cockerels, because the next morning, Burnside had gone missing in the middle of the night and the other two were cringing in the far corner of the rooster house like they had just seen the Bogeyman.  "Well," I thought, "it sucked losing a perfectly good cockerel, but maybe that will convince these two to go inside at dusk."

No such luck!  I came outside to check on them again after sunset, and they were roosting on the fence again!  I carried them into the rooster house.  The next night?  Roosting on the fence yet again!  So I left them there and went back to my own house.  Sure enough, the next morning, Van Buren had gone missing, and Booster was cringing inside the rooster house.  That finally convinced Booster that being outside after dark meant death by owls, so he went inside to roost every evening after that.

And then about a month later, a golden eagle swooped down and killed Booster in broad daylight.

Sometimes, you just can't win for losing, I reckon.


Day Rating:

Nice (1/4 smiles)

I needed roosters and I got roosters.  Sure, they weren't fated to last, but they were cool (and pretty darned cute) while they lasted!

There used to be an old tree where that stump is now.  It had grown so that its trunk curved over the corner of the workshop there, and eventually the soil gave way, the roots came up a little and the tree fell over and crinkled the top of the workshop.  And then it continued to grow that way until Dad called in a favor and got Bo, the neighbor across the street to come over with a ladder, a chainsaw and a tractor-drawn cart, cut the tree into pieces from top to bottom and haul it off.  Dad was cool with Bo selling the cut-up wood for firewood afterwards...whatever helped compensate Bo for his time and gasoline, I guess.

The workshop's roof is still crumpled from where it held up that tree's weight for so many years, but so long as only a minimum of rain gets in there, we're okay with that too.


Day Rating:

Nice (1/4 Smiles)

Goodbye, you stupid old tree, and good riddance!

Mom's birthday is September 19th, so going into Walmart's breakroom and seeing her name mentioned like this was cool.

On the other hand, that's the most that Walmart would ever do for someone's birthday.  Plus, you were working at frickin' Walmart!  So getting your name on the breakroom wall for a week was like finding a dime in a pile of fresh dog turds.  That's about the best way I can describe it, really.


Day Rating:

Okay (0/4 Smiles or Frowns)

Happy Birthday, Mom!  Too bad you're working at Walmart instead of Trump Tower, huh?  

Remember the old Two Señoritas building getting torn down about two months back?  Here's why it was being torn out: As I had so astutely surmised, something new was to be built in its place.

As time would tell, that "something new" would turn out to be a Schlotzsky's restaurant.  I had no way of knowing that at the time, but a new building meant promise and hope.  And those tend to be good things.  


Day Rating:

Nice (1/4 Smiles)

Yay, new business in Canton!  Commerce!  Civic revitalization!  A possible new place to eat!  Yay!  

I caught a stray cat (seen here) in one of my cage traps (also seen here).

I don't have much tolerance for predators coming around my chickens; if that cat had been an opossum or a raccoon, he wouldn't have gotten out of that cage alive.  But cats are the one exception to that norm.  So after taking this photo (and texting it to my Aunt Alma, to let her know that she had a new cat on the way), I put the cage trap in my trunk, drove out to Uncle Jerry's farm, carried the cage trap up behind Uncle Jerry's trailer house (where Uncle Jerry and Aunt Alma leave bowls of cat kibble out to help keep stray cats around the place) and let the cat out.  I got rid of a threat to my young chickens, my chickens got one less predator to worry about, Aunt Alma and Uncle Jerry got a new cat to help keep the mice out of their cattle feed, and the cat got a new lease on life.  Everyone was a winner that day.  Except for the mice.  But mice are useless vermin, so screw the mice.


Day Rating:

Nice (1/4 Smiles)

Do I really need to explain further?  Meow.