A small thing really, living on the edge of the desert it’s hard to say what you would see on any given day when you look out the window or head out to the yard.  On occasion I’ve had a pesky mouse get into my humble abode and I set a nice trap for it with a little piece of bacon stuffed into it for the mouse’s last meal.  It never fails.

I simply throw the whole trap away in the garbage.  I don’t like poisoning and I don’t like those glue traps that stick them to the box and you discard it — I feel that is very inhumane, like dying of cancer or starvation.  With the trap, it’s one SMACK, and they’re usually dead immediately.

What does this all have to do with a cat under the house?  Everything.  A few weeks ago my trusty dog Scout started going ba-doinkers, running into my bathroom (where she isn’t allowed and she never goes back there) but all of a sudden she was sniffing the floor along the wall, trying to get the door open on the cabinet that houses the sink, and that was the first sign that something was rotten in Demark in my house that shouldn’t be there.

I had steel wool stuffed around the plastic plumbing that comes up from the floor inside the cabinets and that usually keeps all rodents and bugs from deciding they are going to be my guest. But then I noticed a spot where it looked like the steel wool had slipped.  I set a mouse trap, I caulked around the pipe.  Scout still went insane.

I sprayed febreze, I mopped the floor and the floor boards and she kept trying to sneak back into my bathroom and she started smelling the floor vent in the living room.  I didn’t catch a mouse.  After a few days I knew there had to have been one in the house to have moved around the floor along the walls in the bathroom, but it was long gone by now so it had to be something else.

There are feral cats out and about in the neighborhood and we’d had the crawlspace cover off that goes under the house while we were doing some work so…first thought…a cat.

We put the cover back on the crawl space and nothing seemed to appease Scout, she’s rock-head-harded and stubborn; she then began sniffing underneath the deck and all the vent covers on the block foundation. I took the cover off a few days later, thinking that if a cat had been trapped under there, it should, by now, be ready to escape for water and food.  Nothing.  Scout was still crazed.

A week ago I was out at the back of the property doing something and happened to look towards the house, this calico cat was coming over from my sister’s property and headed under the deck and disappeared.  I had to get on my knees to look up under the edge/back of the deck and see the cutout in the block wall.  It’s about 4″X6″ — so…a cat for sure.

I don’t mind the cat under the house.  I don’t have any mice trying to lurk or get in and they also kill bugs like centipedes, scorpions, etc. but my dog’s attitude is another issues.  We started putting up lattice sheets along the deck to the ground, not to keep the cat out, but to keep Scout from sitting under the deck with her nose stuck in the small opening.

A few days ago I was in the back, sitting with a cup of coffee in the late afternoon, shaded by my beautifully blooming Chitalpa tree and Scout was under the deck trying to outfox the hole and find the cat.  I watched the cat head over from sis’s digs and then suddenly freeze, foot in the air, and a moment later Scout burst into a run and the cat bailed, making it safely through the fence a mile ahead of Scout.

Scout’s high strung nature isn’t handling this well at all.  I’ve decided the cat is not a problem and I would like it there.  There is more than one feral cat in the neighborhood — I live on the edge of the desert, remember? Once the lattice is up, the cat can get in and out and Scout can’t.  And Scout can’t outrun it, she’s getting older and stiffer and has put on a few pounds.

The funny part of the whole situation is I likened it to Sheldon Adelson’s bitchwart attitude towards online gambling.  Seriously?  Yes, that’s one of the first thoughts that popped into my head.

Aside from the fact that cats and dogs don’t normally get along and that they are part of the animal kingdom where they fit into a certain ‘enemy’ category, think about it.  The cat is minding it’s own business, has a territory staked out that it hunts, including the desert because we’ve seen it come in from that side.  It eats birds, little chipmonkie-ratbastard things that like to burrow under your shed floor and other places and eat a lot of your cacti and other things you plant, probably baby rabbits, quail, snakes, baby grouse, and anything it can find.  It’s not intruding on anyone’s space, and IMHO, it cleans a certain amount of vermin from my yard area.

Even though Scout is nowhere nearly as ugly and disgusting as Adelson is, she is just being a dog and refusing to just let the cat go about its own way.  Now I’m in the process of setting up a barrier to keep Scout from terrorizing the cat, just as I’d like to set up a barrier for Adelson because it irritates me to death to have someone flaunt their money and power and try to take away my freedom.

Perhaps you won’t see the connection as I see it, between Adelson and his anti-online gambling campaign and Scout and the cat.  Scout is actually making this a very difficult situation when it should be so easy.  I now have to watch her around the vent covers on the block foundation.  She tore one off a few days ago while she was barking and becoming frenzied.  Of course the cat was under the house, just kicking back out of reach and doing what it does.

I could prevent the cat from being able to get under the house, but why should I? Just as in, “Why should Adelson prevent me from playing online poker with the rest of the world…legally?”

This whole post is another one of my insanity threads.  It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but me — and it does.

A couple of pictures of some of my trees and bushes bursting into bloom right now — this makes me very happy:

Of course the wind was blowing while I was trying snap pictures. The following plant is courtesy of a seed pod that fell off of one of these plants at Star Nursery two years ago.

And this is the gorgeous Chtalpa, I have two of them — planted the first summer I was here.

Laters, it’s time to gear down for the night.