Boobies and Fleas

The latest Creation magazine has a picture of a Booby on the cover... the bird, not the um... well, anyway you can imagine the breakfast table conversation we had this morning... Booby traps, boobies with feet (the bird on the cover has blue feet), baby boobies (there were some booby chicks in the picture) it was enlightening and re-enforced for me that this is a testosterone-centric household. I am the only princess here and although that has it's perks it also means that sometimes my presence is forgotten about when they get a bit too carried away with themselves.

It makes my heart happy when I hear my kids chastising each other. Not over everything, that just gets on my goat, it's when I hear "No, Dragon, be gentle, Mummy is precious" or "Lion, careful with my Mummy, she not tough for that" that I realise my kids may leave sharp, pointy toys right where my feet hit the floor when I get out of bed but they really do want to try to look after me. I often wonder if they are trying to kill me though with the toys beside my bed. Their favourites seem to be things with wheels that will scoot out from under my feet when I stand on them, sharp objects, large, unbalanced objects so there is no way to get a sure footing on the ground. But in spite of all those times they do want to keep me safe, at least from each other.

We are having a bit of a flea problem at the moment. We don't even own a pet of any description, well, no real ones. Perhaps Huddy has imaginary fleas or bird mites or something but i never see him scratching so I'll just assume he's fine. The fleas are from our noisy neighbours cats. We only have 1 direct neighbour, they are great. They have a beautiful dog who is so well behaved and clean and quiet and stays out of trouble but then across the street there is a family that is kinda noisy... when they were little their kids thought our unfenced front yard was a great place to play, it's the biggest open lawn area on the street so why not? well, because they then would either try to climb our drain pipes when their stuff went on our roof or they would time their noisiest play with when I finally got my baby that never slept to close his eyes and sleep for the first time in 48 hours. Yeah, fun times.

So they had a couple of cats back then... who bred and bred and now it's like a cat lady situation only it's a whole family and not one lady... they like to poop in our sandpit (now we're talking about the cats, not the family), sleep ON our plants, pee on our plants, they killed our Kaffir Lime somehow, it was left with us by our friends when they left town and one of the cats moved in and killed it, "count to ten....". They like to lie at the bottom of our driveway or under the wheels of the cars if they are on the driveway waiting for us to drive over them and squish them, that'll encourage good neighbourly bonding wont it "1, 2, 3, 4..." they stand in the middle of the road playing chicken with us until we come to a complete stop to wait for them to move (although I think they learned this from their human owners) "5, 6, 7..." they freak out my children by jumping on our screens in the middle of the night and looking through their bedroom window and shredding the mesh on the screen "8, 9, 10..." and now they have given us fleas "NOT HAPPY JAN".

One of the cats seems to be pregnant too... fun, real fun.

I'm not a real fan of cats. I have made allowances for a few cats in my time. Wolf's geriatric old cat that he neglected to tell me about when we went down for me to meet his parents when we were dating. He had told me about the other cat so I was prepared for one cat but he wasn't sure if this one was still alive so he hadn't informed me that I would be competing for his love with a protective feline. I could handle competing with Dragon of the Half-Dozen for his uncles affection, he was such a cute little kid and I was trying to get in good with the family and I could understand his view point that his Uncle Wolf had abandoned him and then come back with this chick in tow and how dare she think she had any claim to his Uncle Wolf. The cat... was not so cute and was rather more passive aggressive. I am allergic to cats a bit so I was told to keep the door closed to the room I was in so that the cat couldn't sleep on the bed. It still managed. I am sure it was thinking "I'll send her into anaphylaxis, that'll get rid of her for sure" (okay, I'm not THAT allergic, I'm taking some artistic licence here). Then when that didn't work it decided to just come in in the middle of the night and sleep on my face. Yeah, that went down well, "okay, anaphylaxis didn't work, I'll just smother her to death". I didn't back down though so it ramped it up... I did say that this was a geriatric old cat... no longer taking as good care of itself as it once had... I woke up the next time with it "taking a photo" of me real close up with it's not so clean nether regions. Wolfs mum did keep the cat quite clean, it was in no way neglected and I do not at all envy her the job she had but it's impossible for anyone to keep up with the toilet needs of a geriatric feline, so on this particular occasion it was well, unpleasant. My first instinct was to fling it across the room and dunk my head in disinfectant but I instead gently pushed it off, informed him that I was not going anywhere and he'd better get used to the fact that I was taking his Wolf back home with me so please cease and desist with the passive aggressive behaviour. And then I went and washed my face. So see, I do make allowance for "special" cats. The neighbours cats are not at all special. I want them off my screens, out of our sandpit, away from my cars. I do not like them.

I have had my rant, I'll leave it at that. But if you happen to know any secret recipes for stirfry cat ridding a house of fleas I'd love to hear them.