Dragonflies, Butterflies & Lady Bugs

Shouldn't I Get Hazard Pay for This?

I can't figure out exactly when my mother and I switched places. Once upon a time, the best my mother could say about animals was that they were outdoor creatures (now she loves them and is looking forward to boarding our dogs). She didn't like cleaning up after them. I thought she was the most heartless person around. Who wouldn't love a furry little lap cuddler? Who doesn't want a faithful companion who listens to every concern and never talks back? The person who has to clean up after them, that's who!

I truly wish there was a way to have pets that were warm and fuzzy but sans "emissions." Every flippin' animal we have pushes stuff out of one orifice or another and as if that weren't enough, they shoot hair and dander off their bodies too! And do they bother to clean up after themselves? Hell, no! Well, except for Persephone, who wants to clean up after her animal family, but that's probably better left unspecified.

Our resident furry hippity-hop (otherwise known as Jewel the Cat) has taken to hovering in our room at night, bleating like a goat and liking my armpit whenever it's bared. If my armpit isn't bared, she'll take whatever is bared and attempt to remove the skin with her tongue. What gives? Whoever heard of a cat licking like that? It's weird. And in between licks, she makes the aforementioned bleating sounds. I'm convinced she was a porn star in a former life. Possibly one into BDSM as she loves a good spanking. How can anyone get any sleep being tortured by a cat bent on killing with "kindness"? Last night we put her in Gab's room, along with all the other animals. I know it sounds awful, but Gab's still in the "I think my mother is heartless" stage and besides... she sleeps like a log.

Rosie is convinced she could take out the vulture-sized pigeons around here, if only she could find her way outside. If she's not expending oxygen laying around on Gab's bed, then she's sitting in a window somewhere, making staccato if-only-I-were-outside-you'd-be-so-dead noises and attempting to stare down the oblivious birds. When she's not leaving hair deposits or "threatening" the birds, she "claws" at the furniture with her non-existent claws. Considering it is new furniture, I'm glad we had to have them declawed in the wake of Jasmine's transplant. She also likes to "claw" on human legs, which can be quite startling to someone who doesn't know they're declawed, can't it, nygypsy?

And the dogs? Christ, poor Hades is completely neurotic, thanks to Jeff and his laser pointer. Hades loves trying to "catch" the laser pointer and has gotten so obsessive about it that saying the word "dot" causes him to swivel his head around like some squirrel on crack. Not only that, he thinks anything is capable of making the dot, including the baby's butt. I'm not kidding -- we picked her up the other day and he started looking at her butt and then the ground with the "where is it? where is it?" cocked head.

I promised I would not go into detail about Persephone's snacking habits, and I won't. She has plenty of other annoying habits, like plastering herself to our sliding glass door like that lady in the Mervyn's commercials (open, open, open). When that doesn't work, she turns into a snooze alarm and barks once precisely every five minutes. Her only redeeming factor is that when she's in the house, she lets Nina do just about anything to her and seems to think it's great fun. I can see that Nina will soon also think I'm the heartless mother.

::sigh:: Who knew being a parent would include being a zookeeper, complete with muck duty?

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