Saturday 24 March 2007

Doesn't time fly?

I thought that it must have been about a week since my last post so I thought I'd better bring you all up to speed. Imagine my surprise when it appears it has been over a month. Every Friday I get emails from the brilliant B3ta and Holy Moly (although it is making less sense now I'm without idiot box). It seems like these emails are coming daily as the weeks are flying by.

The weather didn't really come to anything. We had a few drops of rain but not enough to protect us from a bastard of a summer. Water cuts are going to be continuous, I fear, through the hottest months of the year. We shall see how it unfolds.

My cats are doing fine. Elsie and Ceylin are plodding along nicely. I went down to the vets yesterday to pick up some more cat food. The problem with putting out food is that you get very popular with all the local cats and so there are constant screams and hisses as soon as I close the front door when all the other cats turn up and hell breaks loose.

As I went up the stairs to the vets, there was a chameleon sitting on the top step looking at me with one eye (the other looking for an escape route). I thought it was a statue and pointed at it and laughed, to which the vet replied "oh there it is!" and picked it up. It was real and someone had brought it in from the road after it got a little lost in the middle of town. This kind of thing happens quite a lot apparently. I showed interest and the vet wrapped it and handed it to me. After a brief fantasy of keeping it as a pet, I realised that the best thing to do would be to put it in the woods behind my house.

The life of a vet is hard here. Just as I was leaving, two men came in with a puppy they just ran over. It's good that people are stopping to help. But these problems are constant and the vets are trying their best to curb the number of animals on the road. I can't remember if I said before but if you see a cat with the left ear cut then it means that it's a female and she's been spayed.

By the time I got home it was dark and so I decided to look after my new friend, Karma, until the morning. At first light I put on my boots and marched up into the mountain. Now the problem with chameleons is that they need sunshine to move at any speed. Poor Karma could bearly summon the energy to hiss at me. He did have the energy to cling to the bars of the cat basket though and it was impossible to get him to release. All I could do was bring the cage near the branch of the tree and prod him gently in the genitals (which was the only way I found to get any kind of reaction out of him (or her)).





Finally he got on the branch and began to blend in with the background (literally). I then realised that he might not like pine trees and thought maybe I should put him on the ground and let him decide. I tried to get him off the branch but he had locked on again and wasnt having any of it. I took this as my cue to leave and waved goodbye to my latest friend.