Cat and Bug Update

Sisi has a bad habit of sitting on the bath mat right behind me when I am at the sink. I have a reciprocal bad habit of turning away from the sink and taking a step without looking where I am going.  So far, no one has been injured but it is only a matter of time.

Sisi seems a bit down in the dumps. Or maybe the heat is making her lethargic, since some of the weight I have lost, she has clearly found, and it may just be too much to be carrying around in the heat.  She let Pudi play with a cockroach the other day and she never ate it.  Maybe she is training Pudi, but I don’t think Pudi has any intention of ever eating them after she is done with them, so it is good I wear slippers in the house.  That is not something I EVER want to have to step on barefooted.

I hung my mosquito net up over my bed last week but haven’t used it properly and probably never will. Pudi sees it as just another thing to play with and if she puts holes in it it will defeat its purpose. Plus, I think it kind of makes me feel claustrophobic, so now I have raised it high enough so she can’t jump onto it and I don’t feel its presence when I lay in bed. I will just spray myself with bug repellant. When I am 70 or so, I will find out that this is the reason I am not going to live to 100, and I won’t complain then I promise.

Speaking of bug spray, I had an emotional moment last week when I took out the DOOM spray (this doesn’t get sprayed on the human body, but on the bodies of the critters) to spray some ants that had found the cat food bowl. These are the tiny normal sized ants, kind of cute in comparison to the others that have visited me from time to time. They periodically dig through the floor grout and cracks to make a beeline to the cat food. Normally I sweep them up or spray them or ignore them.  On this fateful day I sprayed the hole they were coming out of.

Then I noticed how four of these teeny guys were carrying a huge piece of cat food towards their now toxic home.  I suddenly felt deep remorse. I mean, they are among the hardest working and strongest per body weight beings on the planet, right?  Look at them!! What was I thinking??!! I quickly wet some paper towels and started to wipe up the DOOM off the floor and out of their little lair as best I could. I even started crying.

After a while of periodic checking on their status and more tears shed, I found them reconvening around the piece of food and I watched as they carried it home.  Am I going nuts or what? 

This morning, I came back from an overnight trip to Gaborone for the PC 50^th Anniversary party and found that the LB Ants had invaded my kitchen sink and the bathtub.  I don’t feel the same affection for these guys, probably because they are near my dishes and sink and not on the floor in a corner.  Plus they just aren’t as cute. They are thirsty critters though and I understand that.  But the goofballs had managed to burrow into my sponge looking for water. I have no idea how to deal with that one. I can’t exactly DOOM the sponge I use to clean my dishes. And I really don’t want to spray them, but I don’t want to live with them either.  If the cats were at all interested in killing ants, I wouldn’t have this dilemma, I would just turn away and let “nature take its course.” 

So I have taken the approach that since it appears they only do this when I am gone for an overnight, now that I am home maybe they will take the hint and disperse.  If they haven’t by the time I want to take a bath or use my sink I will have to use more draconian methods. In the movie Seven Years in Tibet, the Buddhist monks moved every worm lovingly away from the site Brad Pitt was building on.  Not sure starting an ant farm is what I mean when I say I need to get some hobbies.