polizwrites

[polizwrites]

[polizwrites]

Did you bake the last Amis cake for your neighbour Dottie, or is the world just full of accidental snake throwers?

The world is full of accidental snake throwers!  

I’ve had snakes tossed at me twice myself.  Once during an animal demonstration at the zoo when the keeper holding a corn snake had a sudden and very intense hiccup, and once on an extraordinaily ill-fated middle school backpacking trip when one of the other girls thought she was picking up a necklace in the bushes and instead picked up a garter snake and panicked.

I’ve also had spiders, birds, cats, lizards and on one particularly memorable occasion, a small shark lobbed at me on acident.  It happens, and cake is an appropriate way to apologize.

[polizwrites]

We have exactly one Christmas tradition in my house, and it feels very important to share it. I've been a cat person basically forever and for most of my adult life, my house has had more cats than people in it. They've all liked sleeping under the Christmas tree and all that, but other than that, they always just sort of ignored it.

But in 2018, we got Natasha.

There are about a dozen pictures like that, but I always adopt adult cats, so we figured this just came with having a kitten in the house. She was just this tiny little fluff who still fit in my cupped hands despite being about six months old, so we put away the ornaments, shrugged it off, and took advantage of the opportunity to have a really cute Christmas card the next year.

Then, 2019 came around.

Natasha escalated to sleeping in the tree in between trying to eat all the branches, and honestly, it was too funny to make more than a cursory effort to stop her. My partner and I assumed that since she was still pretty tiny, she had more growing to do and would surely get to a point where her own body weight would keep her from doing this. In the meantime, we left the tree without ornaments that year and just called it good.

But then 2020 came around, forcing us to acknowledge that:

Natasha was not going to get too big to do this. At this point it had become clear that she wasn't developing slowly. She was just a really tiny cat. She's less than half the size of any other cat I've ever had.

Natasha was also not going to chill out enough to stop doing this.

But hey. Who needs ornaments with a face like that poking out of the branches at you all the time?

Sure enough, 2021 Natasha also had zero chill about the tree, but at this point it would have been weirder if she did leave it alone.

I thought I had seen everything, but this year I'd been kind of down and my partner decided to surprise me by setting up the tree and stuff while I was at work. It was an incredibly sweet gesture considering they don't actually even like Christmas decorations. It also meant I got to come home to this.

I kept expecting her to fall out, but she just chilled there, surveying the room until she got bored. And yes, that is absolutely a big, fancy cat tree she's ignoring in favor of scaling the Christmas tree.

Two days before Christmas, she has finally gotten bored enough that I'm making my first attempt in ages to actually put up ornaments. At this point, I'm not sure if I'll be more disappointed if they have to come down or if they don't.

[polizwrites]

(A continuation of This Post)

Sometimes the stars align and you are privileged to see an animal delve into an activity with primal glee, finally able to do the thing it has specifically evolved to do, and it is wondrous and beautiful.

Sometimes those stars align at 1 AM on a moonless night in November in the barely-developed mountains of Durango and it is Wondrous and The Worst Possible Thing That Could Happen.

I’d had Charlie all of 3 months at that point, which coincidentally happened to be how long I’d gone without medication for my anxiety disorder because ~Durango’s Medical and Psychiatric Care Is Terrible~ and I was compensating by taking him out into the rapidly freezing mountains every time the dread started setting in.  For a 10-month old puppy, this was fantastic.

That night we were walking up the short path that lead to the dirt road that circled the neighborhood and I was busy looking up at the stars while Charlie was enthusiastically trailing a scent along the riverbank. I don’t miss Durango but I Do miss the the high mountain stargazing.  You can see the band of the milky way almost every night the moon isn’t full.  It’s reassuring to me, to be so small in the face of the majesty of the universe.

Something in the bushes beside us Crunched.

Charlie froze, his neck back and tail a perfectly straight line as he pointed into the dense willows that lined the riverbank, eyes wide and nose snuffling furiously.

I, mistakenly, assumed he’d sniffed out the jackrabbits again.

I’m distractible as all hell but not a terrible pet owner.  I keep Charlie on leash at all times, and that night he was wearing not only his anti-lurching chest harness, but a glowing orange collar in case he somehow managed to get loose and decided to run into traffic.  The overall effect at a distance made him look perhaps slightly more menacing than a 45lb puppy should have looked:

…Which is probably why the creature lurking in the willows decided to try and make a run for it.

Now, I’d more or less gotten used to the Ominous Jackrabbits and thunderingly stupid mule deer, worked out a peace treaty with the coyotes and and had gotten pretty good at planting my thighs to keep Charlie from launching himself any farther than the length of his leash, but it still too both of us by surprise when the thing that leapt out of the willows to the far bank and started galloping into the night turned out to be a Black Bear.

Not a huge one- probably one of last year’s cubs by the size and legginess, but that was still 100lbs more opportunistic carnivore than I wanted to deal with right now, and prepared to grab Charlie and run the other way back into the safety of the neighborhood.

Charlie, on the other hand, was more than game for this game and lunged with all the might in his tiny little body-

And between our combined stresses, the leash

Snapped.

I don’t know Charlie’s top Speed for certain, but his best friend at the time was a fresh-off-the-track-for-being-aggressive-not-slow greyhound and it only took her about five seconds to barrel the length of a football field, and his nose was rarely more than an inch or two behind her ribcage.

Which for those of you in countries with civilized units puts them at around 70 kmh.

Your average black bear can only book it at 60 kmh.

I can do MAYBE 30 kmh on a good day, or when I am suddenly full of terror, which I was at that moment as I watched my beloved son launch himself over the river after the bear.

Charlie isn’t the most elegant runner- he has a lovely double-suspension gallop that lets him fly but he tends to bound upwards like a gazelle, though this might be a factor of him being shorter than the sagebrush he was chasing the bear through and he needed the vantage to locate it again.  This at least afforded me the occasional glimpse of orange as I booked it after them as fast as my stubby little hobbit legs could carry me, only otherwise able to navigate by the sound of crashing foliage and Charlie’s yelps of glee.

I bolted through the sagebrush and scrub oak as fast as I could, certain I was going to slide on the loose dirt and turn an ankle or clothesline myself on one of the many hidden barb-wire fences the ranchers have erected and abandoned over the years through here.  Eventually we came to an open grazing field and in the starlight I could see that Charlie had drastically closed the distance between them and was now snapping for the bear’s hocks, clearly having the time of his little doggy life.

For some reason, it didn’t occur to the bear that it was twice the size of it’s pursuer and didn’t just turn around to smack Charlie into an early grave, instead opting to keep running for another half-mile across the pastureland until we finally got to the actual treeline, halfway up the nearest foothill, before finally finding a suitable Ponderosa to climb, running up the trunk at almost the same speed it had been crossing the field with.

Charlie, unfortunately, had built up quite a bit of momentum in the chase and managed to use it to bound a good eight feet up the trunk and snap his teeth into the very tip of the bear’s tail.

I caught up to him as he was sneezing the fur out of his mouth, Bear grunting and whimpering from the branches some 30 feet above us.  He danced around the bottom of the tree, barking and wagging his tail hard enough to wag his entire back end.

“CHARLESTON!” I screamed.

He turned to face me, face full of pride.  “Look what I caught!  Just for you!”  he seemed to say.

“NO!” I bellowed, voice hoarse from being unable to catch my breath and tears streaming down my face.

Charlie, for all his gaminess, is a very soft dog that I’ve never had to say “no” about something twice to.  He instantly cowed, crawling up to me and rolling over, trying to lick my face from the ground.

“I love you, you moron but NO.”  I said, picking him up and dragging him by the harness as I backed up, still watching the black lump in the tree that I sincerely hoped was the bear.

The bear was suddenly illuminated by distant headlights and I realized there was a more serious issue.  The neighborhood is bordered by highway on one side, Deserted BLM land on two sides, and a private Ranch on the other, and we had run into neither the highway nor BLM land.  

Farmer McGregor was not over-fond of trespassers.  Especially at 1AM and deep into his land and well off the easy-to-mistake-for-an-access-road.  

I grab Charlie’s harness in one hand and his skinny dog ass in the other and hoist him up like an extremely disagreeable piece of luggage and book it back in what I sincerely hope is the direction of the neighborhood.  It takes what feels like hours to find my way back but eventually I get back to my door, panting and wheezing and covered in dirt and leaves and the skin around my eyes red from crying.

Husband hears me come in at 2:30 AM.  “Did you go somewhere?” he calls from the bedroom.  He is a sensible, Diurnal creature.

“For a run.” I say.

If you enjoyed this story, please consider donating to my Ko-fi or Paypal, or you can subscribe/pre-order a copy of my Family Lore Book containing even more absurd stories at my Patreon .  Thank you all for your support!

[polizwrites]

hey don't cry. 7,401 species of frog in the world, ok?

[polizwrites]

ok i just got this thought out of nowhere but blog divers (people who scroll through a blog and reblog things that were posted YEARS AGO) are actually a super important part of the tumblr ecosystem

With people going inactive and deactivating, a lot of classic tumblr posts and also missed gems get lost because those connections get broken. Even on my own blog I forget about posts I made until I see someone in my activity reblog one of them- which then inspires me to reblog it myself because it was a good post and I want my new followers to see

do not feel bad about diving through someone's blog and reblogging shit from years ago, it keeps dashboards alive

(and if anyone has a problem with that, they can just block you or they can delete the root post ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, two things that have absolutely no effect on the grand scheme of our lives)

[polizwrites]

happy normal fuckin day to everyone who doesnt celebrate christmas or rly any holidays today n tomorrow. hope you have an average day. hope its chill like any other

[polizwrites]

went to the pub for a drink on my first real day off in over a week and watched the girl behind the bar drop the entire cash drawer on the floor in the middle of the rush and then just stare at it at her feet for like a solid two minutes

[polizwrites]

what do they put in large rocks that make u just want to. stand on it.

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if you don’t know the difference between a hare and a rabbit you’ve never gazed into the cold wild eyes of a hare and known that if it could speak it would speak backwards

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Guys?

[polizwrites]

Happy Hanukkah

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went a little overboard on our costume this halloween

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hello. pls don't give my writing to ai to make creepy ai voices. like yeah yeah they're scrubbing the internet so they're gonna get it anyway but like. maybe don't make it easier.

[polizwrites]

Get fit get angry

[polizwrites]

you could never make blazing saddles today. movies take a really long time to film and it's already 11am on the west coast. also most actors and film staff would probably like to spend christmas eve with their families.

[polizwrites]

idk who needs to hear this today but you don't have to marry a man if you don't want to