LOL...Karen, you and my son would get along great! He too doesn't care for rats. Or snakes. Or even worms. (Don't ask.) And ever since the great squirrel debacle of last year, they too are on his 'avoid at all cost' list. Me...I grew up collecting or admiring just about anything that ran, walked, or squirmed. You know, if I hadn't been there for my son's birth, I'd swear he was adopted.
At one point in my young life I had a rather admirable collection of salamanders that I kept in a large glass jar, which unfortunately came to a demise (the jar, not the salamanders) one afternoon when - in an effort to hide them from my mom, who also did not share my love of quirky pets - it fell off the top of the dryer in our basement. Salamanders and dirt flew everywhere, and I never did recover any of them. For all I know they may have lived happily ever after in teeny tiny salamander condos, erected in the dank recesses of my dad's unused workshop. Neither was my dad impressed a few years later when I was the proud teenaged mom of 32 mice, all assortments of colors and patterns, living in glass tanks and complicated wire cages within the disaster that was my bedroom. Or when I took to collecting toads, dressing them up in elaborate wedding gowns made of toilet paper and string, complete with tiny little wedding ceremonies in the long grass of our backyard. I never really did know if I was marrying boy and girl toads, but then I guess it didn't matter...they didn't seem too happy either way, at least until I released them back into the wilds of their real home.
Never2manybunnies, wouldn't it be nice if we could teach our rabbits to cut hair properly? I am kind of wondering if Yofi actually could do a good job at it; since I tend to leave my hair to the last minute before going for another trim, I wind up trimming my bangs two or three times on my own. Having a permanent hair trimmer at home who'd be willing to 'werk foar karrots' (in Yofispeake) might just not be a bad idea.
And yeah, I am very sad about the base, especially since it will be sitting there unused for who knows how long. That's why I took a ton of pictures last summer, after I heard about the impending shutdown...at least I can look back and remember all of the great times The Dog and I had there.
Oh, one thing before I'm off to bed...I'll relate what happened a couple of summers ago when I decided to take both my dog and my sister's up to the base for a romp. (I was dogsitting at the time, as my sister was off to Washington/Vancouver/Maryland/whoknowswhichcity on one of her many conferences.)
After we reached the base I let the dogs off their leashes so they could run and explore, which is exactly what they did. I hung back and strolled quietly along one of the abandoned roads, watching as the two tailwaggers headed off into some brush. A few moments later, however, I was startled when I almost stepped on a rather large garter snake who'd been sunning himself on the hot asphalt. He barely moved a muscle, so I stood there for a moment admiring the beautiful patterns along his body, and how elegant he looked (of course many would not agree with me in stating that a snake can look elegant, but he did to me). The dogs, in the meantime, had emerged from the bushes a few yards up ahead, so I called to them, wanting to show them the snake, wondering if they would even notice it was an actual creature and not just a big stick lying in the road. Well, Kaya was the first to respond to my call, trotting down the road toward me, and right toward the snake. At the very last moment she happened to look down and see it, and her response - if put into words - would probably have been something like, "Whoa, dude!! Did you see that stick? It just moved, Man! I swear to you, it did! All on its own!" So she poked around and sniffed the snake (from a reasonable distance, of course), then quickly lost interest when she thought she heard a
SQUIRREL!!!...and off she went.
Lassie, in the meantime, was lagging behind; but when she realized that she had become separated from Kaya, she came barreling down the road, and straight into the path of the moving stick. Now, I do have to say this about Lassie: She is probably one of the world's best escape artists, able to squeeze out of cages that no dog should ever be able to squeeze out of, able to leap 5-ft fences with ease....but she definitely isn't one of the brightest crayons in the canine coloring box. When I yelled at Lassie to "STOP!", lest she steamroller the poor snake and hurt it, she did come to a complete halt, and wound up standing right over it. The snake, now aware that something was invading its tanning space, raised its head up to look around, and began to slowly coil its body, ever so slightly. Lassie, standing there with tongue hanging halfway to the ground, smile on her face wider than the infamous Cheshire cat's, hadn't noticed a thing. So I pointed to the ground and said, "Lassie...look out! There's a snake right at your feet!"
Lassie just stood there, staring at me with that stupid grin on her face, and wagged her tail.
So I yelled again. "Lassie, move! You're going to step on a SNAKE!!" And again I pointed.
Again she looked at me, wagged her tail, and that absurd grin grew even bigger.
So I yelled once more. "LASSIE, MOVE!!!" Even the snake got the idea at that point and I guess he decided he'd had enough of the dramatics, as he suddenly began slithering excitedly back and forth in an effort to vamoose outta there.
And that's when Einstein-dog exploded. The tip of the snake's tail just happened to touch the tip of one of Lassie's toes, causing her to (finally!) look down between her legs. And when she did, I swear, she flew about six feet straight up in the air, looking for all the world like she'd be stuck with a red-hot poker. Legs were flailing frantically as she attempted to single-doggedly rewrite the laws of nature and somehow, spontaneously sprout wings. Her eyes were as huge as dinner plates, a look of terror written on her face that I'd never before seen on a dog, and never have since. And to this day I will swear on a stack of Yofi's carrots that, if any dog could ever successfully take flight, Lassie almost did. She literally hung suspended in the air for what seemed forever, by the frenetic dog-paddling of her feet...combined with the sheer terror of having seen, with her own two doggie eyes, a lifeless stick arising from the dead. To get her.
When Lassie finally did come back to the ground, she hit with all four feet running, and she bolted halfway across the base before I could call her back. The snake, on the other hand, had slithered quickly off in the other direction. If he'd been contemplating selling his house for new digs elsewhere, this surely would have convinced him to do so, as the neighborhood was obviously getting just a little too weird for his taste.
And so that was the highlight of my afternoon at the military base that day; I know I never had enjoyed such a hilarious moment in quite some time. It almost even topped some of Yofi's antics...and that's saying a LOT. So now I know to never ever tease Lassie about the "SNAKE!!", and of course I wouldn't be so mean as to do so...but oh, sometimes I'm so tempted....just to see that dog dance in midair once again....
:biggrin2:
