I have a new appreciation for "Tom and Jerry's" Tom! I now know that I have spent too much time feeling sorry for "poor" Jerry and laughing in the face of Tom's amazing perseverance through failure and pure hopelessness.
I decided I should start my own nature show in the spring of 2006 when I risked my life to save those around me from a.....well here. I will just let you see for yourself.
http://ourplaceourplace.blogspot.com/2006/05/my-own-nature-show.htmlI would like to say that I have learned to be a little more graceful or at least appear to have learned to deal with my subjects in a more productive way, but I can't. At least I didn't feel like I had at 4:00 am this morning when Patrick came into our bedroom to wake us up and announce that, "something was making a strange noise in his bedroom." I knew immediately, though I closed my eyes and hoped desperately that it wasn't true, that Alvin, our chipmunk had finally figured out how to get out of his cage. Might I remind you that he has everything he could ever possibly want to live a wonderful life right at his fingertips. At any rate, he decided that he needed a new adventure. We found him in the playroom behind our hand weight table making an everlasting mess of our new carpet. Now, this would be the point in my show where I would like to report that Jeff and I used our human intelligence to outsmart the cornered rodent and returned him to his cage unharmed and in good timing. It wasn't to be! Jeff flushed him out while I managed to let him run right over me and into the living room..then the foyer...then Patrick's room, full of too many hiding places, corners, and toys. The next 1 1/2 hours or so was anything but pretty. If we COULD have caught it on film, it wouldn't have been a show worthy of the Discovery channel, but probably would have been one of the most watched and most pitiful
Utube videos ever to have been thrown into the
Utube world. It took us that long to realize that it just wasn't going to happen. We were only trying to return Alvin to the safety of his little habitat like the Steve
Irwins of the world. By the time we gave up..or lost Alvin seemingly for good...the beds were upside down and everything that Patrick owned was in a mountain sized heap in the middle of his room. Our tiny Alvin turned into a
tasmanian tornado, leaving us to pick up the pieces and wallow in self pity at having failed to prove that we are the smarter species. All we wanted to do was help him...return him to his "safe place".
Hours later, after promises to the kids of a slow, fat, lazy guinea pig if Alvin hadn't
returned to us by Saturday, our precious Ginger proved that, while we were failing miserably in our roles as humans, that she still knew how to perform like a dog. She finally sniffed Alvin out and gladly let us know where to find him. I finally lived up to my potential and decided that, while I would never be as fast as a chipmunk, that I knew..that I knew..that I knew..that I was smarter. Using a plan that I had gone over at least a hundred times in my head since giving up on our quest that morning, I put a pillow case, a little common sense, and three children to good use.
Within 15 minutes, Alvin's adventure was over...it was a wrap.
Hey, a good nature show never happens in only 15 minutes, right? It's all about the chase!
