Each week, AOL's Blogfather and gatherer of dust bunnies, John Scalzi, lets rip with another one from the safety of his traing wheel blog, By The Way. You can pick up your question there and be sure to leave a link to your answer in the comments section, while you are at it.
"Weekend Assignment #48: Recount an amusing tale of a pet attacking someone or something. By "amusing," I mean that a) no one was seriously injured, least of all the pet (pet humiliation is okay), b) you laughed about it at the time, or sometime shortly thereafter. You know: Funny! Okay, then.
Extra Credit: Ever seen your cat/dog walk right into a sliding glass door? Do tell."
Dear John,
Damn, man, stop sending us your left overs, would ya? It's freezing here. It rained the other day. And snowed, And thundered and lightninged (¿word?). The high this past week was nearly 50º one afternoon... I sat in the car waiting for my wife, reading a book (Laurell K. Hamilton's Incubus Dreams, if you must know) with the window down for over an hour! We had two foot of snow last weekend. You gotta stop this nonsense and send this crap due East to Pennsylvania and New York ... we just don't need it up here.
I've wracked my brain cells, the few not occupied with the 2005 Sports Illustrated's "Swimsuit Edition," that is, and for the life of me I can't come up with any tales about a pet attacking anything in an amusing or humiliating way. Lucifer, the inside cat, learned to box with me at an early age when I would head to bed and he was just coming up on "Cat Crazy Time." He'd stick a paw out between the bannister on the landing and I'd pop it with my finger. Silly game, fun at the time, it has morphed into hiding in the dark and attacking feet and ankles as they go by. I think it is cute. SWMBO finds it annoying to the nth degree as he mostly attacks her when she is wearing a nightgown. So nothing amusing on the pet front. Perhaps it is because most attacks in the country involve blood and death. I had a German Shepherd Dog once that would spend hours stalking wood chucks. He seemed to consider them as much of a nuisance as I did and he took great pride in killing two or three a month. He'd also run deer if allowed to, so he only got to go out during non-winter months unescorted. We once had a cat that prided himself on being the "great white rabbit hunter" ... I'd see him coming from the woods, dragging a carcass nearly as big as he was, howling to beat the band, as if to say, "Look at me!" Invariably the wife took a dim view and the kids thought finding dead bunnies on the doorstep to be "gross, Dad, make him stop!" As if I had any control over the matter.
Nothing funny about dead bunnies. But Mother Nature has dealt me a blow the past couple of weeks which you will find amusing. I have a rabid sparrow stalking me in my office. You read me right the first time. A sparrow stalking me. Actually, I think he's stalking himself, but we won't tell him that. It'd ruin all his fun.
I have three windows in the office. Two look to the North on the side towards the neighbor. The other looks to the East and the highway. My office is off the living room ( a parlor, actually, but we don't have use for one of those anymore, what with modern embalming practices and all). The living room also has a window looking East with an air conditioner in it, as well as two windows looking over the dooryard, which is the demesnes of the feral cat population. The window in my office nearest me has the limb of a gum tree just beyond it; sometimes the branches scrape the wall of the house in a bad blow. In that tree, for the past couple of weeks, a sparrow has taken up residence. Rather, he has taken his place on the jousting pitch. And he pitches a fit, too. Pretty much all day long, he sits on the branch and attacks his reflection in the glass. If he notices me shooing him away, or if the inside cat, Lucifer, perches his butt on the fax machine and props his paws on the window, the sparrow will go to one of the other windows mentioned above and continue his attacks. But they haven't got branches to launch onself from, so he returns to the window just beyond my head frequently. Too frequently, if you ask me.
I haven't been able to compose a single line of prose during the daylight hours since his arrival. He has hit the window so much and so hard that his beak is a glowing red, as are his eyes. The aforementioned cat finds him endlessly fascinating and I have a running battle to keep the cat off the office equipment nearest the windows (no doors on the room in order to coax some heat in from the stove in the living room). In his fervor to jump at the bird, the cat has turned off the answering machine twice, faxed his tail to the dairy once and printed about fifty blank pages, which represents just how little I have managed to write over the past couple of weeks.
I know that the bloody bird is protected by Federal laws, else I'd have shot the nuisance by now. The outside cats won't mess with him - they consider him on par with the Wandering Jew, I suspect. I can just hear the alpha male -- Pumpkin -- reply to my query now.
" Muy loco, man, we won't mess with that mojo. That bird is crazy, yo!"
So Lucifer is destroying the office, I am losing valuable nap time to the constant tap, tap, tap at the window, nothing has been written and that is definitely bad. I need my beauty sleep. My wife considers my lack of progress solving the matter to be suspect and I am starting to lose my grip on sanity. Wait, there's more... they're forecasting snow for Monday. Oh joy...
Give our best to Krissy and Athena. Keep plugging away and we'll do the same. See you next week ... same bat-channel, same bat-time.
Cheers!
wil
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