Is the Palmetto Bug. A.K.A. The Flying Roach.
I can deal with a whole lot of things, and flying roaches are not on that list. They make me die a little inside every time one gets close to me. Which is unfortunate, since I come in close contact with them on a regular basis these days. I have the Orkin man on speed dial and he told me today that it was a battle we were going to have to fight together. They live outside, these are not the sort of roaches that inhabit the inside of your walls. These are the kind of roaches who might fly off with your dog if you leave her in the backyard for too long.
Although, I do have to say that these roaches have nothing on this sucker that lives in maggie’s parents pond. I swear to the heat of the South Georgia summer that thing in the water is a giant catfish. Who Maggie swears wants to eat her dog.
This train of thought is going to spin off in two different directions – one – animals around here that want to eat your dog – over in Aiken they have collected 7 monster pythons – man-eating pythons as they are called – and placed them in a big pit to see how they survive. Sweet. This sounds like a HORRIBLE experiment. Apparently a bunch of pet shops carried these man eating pythons in Florida back in the ’90s and a lot of the snakes escaped in the destruction of Hurricane Andrew. (side note – Florida is like another country. When you enter Florida on I-95 the big trucks have to go through a customs like check point. How weird is that?)
A direct quote from the article –
While pythons don’t make a habit of attacking people and most aren’t large enough to eat a person, Gibbons called the possibility a “nightmare.”
“What about the first kitty cat they eat? Or the first little poodle? They’d love poodles, I imagine,” he said.
Mike Dorcas, a professor at Davidson College in North Carolina, has sliced open pythons in Florida to find the remains of white-tailed deer, bobcats and large birds.
Then this last part –
Pythons are masters of disguise — slippery and quick — and all but one of the serpents was invisible within minutes of being deposited into the pit.
So counting pythons in the wild is a daunting task. Scientists don’t have an accurate estimate of how many pythons are in Florida.
“It’s certainly in the thousands, or tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands,” said Gibbons.
The other train of thought is the safety of the fish you catch in the Central Savannah River Area. I thought it was interesting that the parts of the river that do have advisories say – one meal per week. Is that one fish per week? Because, my meal is not the same as some other people’s meal. Some people could eat four fish.
So, we do a lot of quiet title actions around here, which is how you clear title to a piece of property that has been sold at a sheriff’s sale when the property taxes haven’t been paid. Although quiet title actions do not normally involve any particularly complicated legal principles, the difficulty lies in finding all the people who have ever had a claim of title to the property and serving them, which often time includes adjacent land owners or the heirs of an estate. Which means I spend a lot of time trying to find people and figuring out how to serve them in Jamaica, New York, or Erie, Indiana, or, as the case was today – Denver, Colorado.
The process server I found in Denver is a fleet of bike couriers. How cool is that? This time my petition to quiet title is going to be delivered by bike! This really made my day. And the guy I talked to on the phone was so nice and friendly and it made me really wish I was in Colorado. I got really Colorado Home Sick. Or maybe I’m just, IT IS REALLY HOT HERE SICK.
Last night at tennis clinic I got to play singles with Jane. AGGHH. I LOVE singles. I love singles so much more than doubles. In doubles I feel like I’m in the way, or the wrong place, or I should have made that shot because I’m letting my partner down. In singles, I know where I’m suppose to be the whole time. Maybe I’m not always there, but the knowing is much more instinctive. It’s been so much fun getting back into a sport. I haven’t played a game in a really long time and I didn’t even know how much I missed it.
Briscoe has been sleeping in the new big bed with me recently and every morning I wake up I feel the need to grab her toe and sing to her about catching a tiger by the toe. She fails to see the humor and normally either tries to bite me or kick me.
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the thin line between optimism and delusion... 