Sydney caught a rat!
The ruler is marked in inches. I couldn’t make myself lay it any closer to that dead thing.
Cats and mouse
Sydney and Hobbes sort of have an agreement: Sydney catches ’em, Hobbes eats ’em. Looks here like Sydney’s rethinking that agreement, or at least is making sure Hobbes knows just which of them is the Mighty Hunter.
I much prefer for Hobbes to do the eating; that cat has a cast-iron stomach. Sydney doesn’t — bird, rat hindquarters, whatever gets upchucked, and she has no shame about depositing it on my office floor. You cannot believe how disgusting it is to clean up bloody cat barf that’s still warm.
Bloodstains on concrete
One day my little friend Sydney caught a bird and left its bleeding carcass at the back steps. (She loves me, oh yes she does.) It lay there for several hours before I found it, and by that time the blood had soaked into the concrete.
I washed the spot with a bleach-based bathroom cleaner, and still the bloodstain remains. You can see how the cleaner killed the lichen and bleached the area immediately around the stain.
(The lichen is a welcome guest, by the way, and grows on the vertical sides of the steps and in broad patches on the patio itself. It will eventually eat through the concrete, but I enjoy watching it change through the seasons. The lichen gets a little furrier during the winter, flakier in the summer.)
Why on earth did I file this under Writing? Research, of course. You never know when you might need to know what a pool of blood — and that bird had an amazing amount of blood for a critter so small — does to concrete.
