Friends* and Kitties!
Sheebie here.
It's been a wet summer here in the desert, and one consequence of all the precipitation has been a pestiferous plague of houseflies. This is partly our fault. Our trash receptacle is a wheelie bin type, and the garbage truck (British translation: "Rubbish Lorry") robotically empties the bin into the collector. This is, as you might imagine, not the most delicate maneuver, and the lid of the bin got cracked a while back. No problem, unless the owner dumps copious amounts of clumped dung into the bin without bagging it first--like we do--and then it rains, forming Cat Crap Concrete (six inches deep) at the bottom of the bin when the rain seeps through the holey lid.
This was not a project that we (i.e. Scott) wanted to deal with, or even acknowledge (me), so the CCC kind of festered through the hot weather and suddenly, we had houseflies out the wazoo. (More accurately, albeit indirectly, out of the cat's wazoos.) The damn things were everywhere...the Horde got bored with chasing them, they were so numerous. Scott decided it was time to break out the big guns and came home with twelve rolls of fly paper...and of course he wanted to hang them ALL, everywhere, at once. Since I'm a nice person and I enjoy indulging my husband's insanity whims I helped festoon the house and garage with the sticky harbingers of insectile doom, and we had our first victim within minutes.
Unfortunately, the victim was feline. I was doing some cooking in the kitchen and there was one particularly annoying fly, so I idiotically hung a strip from a hook over the kitchen sink, and left unattended--for like, two seconds--in which Sweet Pea managed to entangle her (formerly) beautiful, plumey tail. Poor Miss Pea, when she panicked and leapt off the counter trying to escape the fly paper's gluey grip her tail adhered to her hind legs as well. After running around like the Keystone Kops Scott and I finally managed to corral her on the Catio and went to work with the scissors.
It was awful.
I felt so bad. I was crying, trying to trim fur. I felt like such a moron to do something so stupid. After about ten minutes Scott and I managed to get all the icky sticky cut out of Sweet Pea's coat, and her gorgeous tail was a hot mess...I am not posting photos, I still feel terrible about the whole thing.
Did I mention this happened a few hours before my flight down to see the folks in Tucson? Well, Karma decided not to dawdle with my payback--when I was changing out the trash can liner in the garage I straightened up smack dab into another fly strip! In my hair. I ended up using gasoline to dissolve the adhesive, and taking two showers to get rid of the gas smell.
It was awful.
So, we now have a New Rule at our house. Direct dung deposit is verboten--it goes into a plastic bag first, and then into the wheelie bin. Which is brand new. The trash company replaced it, free of charge. Also, all fly strips are permanently banned from the premises; we've invested in flyswatters instead. Miss Pea's plume is growing back, thank Cod. And I got a good story to blog about...
Happy Sunday!
XX Sheebie XX
*hee hee hee, did you know that "friends" without the "R" is fiends? Sometimes being a bad typist is fun!
