“Be a giant or grain of sand / Words of wisdom, “Yes, I can.”
I overslept this morning and was rewarded for it.
Shambling drowsily through my morning chores, which include unburdening Miss Mia Sopaipilla’s litter box and removing the contents to the trash bin outside, I glanced up at the banana moon — and saw a shooting star.
Wow! Bonus! A Geminid meteor putting on a show just for me. I tipped Herself to it, she brought Miss Mia outside, and we saw a couple more before the gradually swelling morning light overwhelmed the zippy little fireballs.
Could this be an omen? Is the Lizard Portal finally closing? Maybe. I haven’t seen a day coyote lately. Like my fellow Burqueño Marc Maron I’ll go mystical if I’m terrified.
This is not the work of Hurricane Hilary, which should carve a much wider swath through the high desert.
COVID finally came for Ken Layne of Desert Oracle Radio. But he did his usual Friday-night stint at the Z107.7 FM mic anyway, and you can catch the podcast of same at all the usual places.
“Some people say you should not do your radio show when you’re sick in the head. But I am not one of those people,” he explains.
Layne is waiting for Hurricane Hilary to visit the Mojave — it’s something new for a lot of the local desert rats, but as an old Nawlins hand he knows a little something about rigging for heavy weather.
This week’s episode is heavy on advice for riding out the storm. But he also recounts his bout with The Bug, a random prowler testing his door, and the apparent death and resurrection of a big ol’ spiny desert lizard who is a regular on his patio (but not the radio show).
“Be careful, friends,” Layne advises, adding, “And once you’re prepared, it’s time to hunker down. Enjoy the excitement — nobody ever says that on the weather report — but it’s exciting. It’s real life, it’s right here. No Netflix necessary.”
No excitement for us here in The Duck! City — Hilary will be giving us a miss — but we might catch a little wind burn from her passage. I guess it’s Netflix for us. How about you?
I ain’t opening that door. I’ve seen “Poltergeist.”
Miss Mia Sopaipilla was being a pill as I performed my coffee ritual this morning, so after a couple sips to get the motor running I figured I’d best tend to the litter boxes.
There’s one in the guest bathroom’s tub and another in the spare room where we contain Mia’s restless nature at night. This two-holer setup is a relic of the Before-Time, when we had two cats. Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment) insisted upon having his own personal latrine, and one feels obliged to give a 16-pound cat pretty much anything he deems mission-critical.
I dealt with the tub box first, and yep, it had seen action overnight. Then I headed for the spare room and noticed the door was closed.
Well, hell, I thought. No wonder Mia was pitching a bitch. She was locked out of her quarters. So I opened the door, gave that litter box a cursory inspection, and … it had been used too.
So I cleaned that one up, hauled what had become a sizable bag of feline exhaust outside to the trash, came back inside and asked Herself, “Why’d you close the door to Mia’s room?”
“I didn’t close the door,” she sez to me she sez.
“Well, I sure didn’t,” sez I.
A moment of silence.
“Mother?” she inquires, glancing around.
No reply.
I doubt it was Herself the Elder. She was never much of an eater, and while she had a great head of hair she wasn’t a furry, barring the occasional chin whisker. Plus, I don’t think her shade could squeeze into that litter box, which has a lid on it. It would have been undignified, even in extremis.
When Turks attack.
No, I’m inclined to suspect the Turk. My old comrade had an interesting sense of humor that encompassed leaping at you from hidey-holes, flashing the bathroom lights at us the night he died, and triggering a hallway smoke detector that requires a stepladder to reach as I was rehabbing a broken ankle.
Now there was a cat who found a loo with a lid to be an awful tight fit. He had to poke his blue-eyed brain-box out of the one we kept downstairs in Bibleburg. We called his bathroom breaks “driving the Turkentank.”
When you gotta go, you gotta go, they say. But if you’ve gone, do you gotta come back? If you do, leave the door open, or at least crack a window. Maybe light a match. I’m trying to enjoy my coffee here.
The Commander inspects his (purely defensive) chemical-weapons stockpile.
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