Field Trips

 The best field trip I ever went on in my life was the chocolate factory in Bandung. It was like Willy Wonka but nobody turned into a blueberry or was humiliated by an Oompa Loompa song. The factory workers made it their mission to stuff our fat foreign fingers with as much chocolate as we could hold. They also gave us plastic bags to hold our loot. And I also used the pristine white cap we were supposed to be wearing to keep our hair out of the vats of melting chocolate as a secondary container. To anyone who found a blonde hair in your Silver Queen circa 1994, I apologize.  Probably most parents, like mine, confiscated those plastic bags from their children’s jittery hands as soon as they picked us up from school, but possibly many children, like myself, had made a significant dent in their contents before handing them over. My ability to consume incredibly large amounts of sugary treats in one go has been with me from childhood.

Silver Queens of the Modern Era

These days, I’m still going on field trips, though they don’t generally involve chocolate anymore, as chocolate here melts as soon as you take it out of the refrigerator. This trip I subsisted on mangos and Smurf gummies that I bought in Modern Market. (I hold on to a secret hope that whenever I check out at Modern Market, the ladies think I’m buying supplies for a birthday party for a six-year-old. I mean, how rude of them to assume that I’m going to eat all of the gummies and chips and cookies myself?!) My most recent trip with the DONG (Direction des Organisations Non-Gouvernementales) was to visit our projects out east to for the DONG to see what we have accomplished. Yes, I did laugh the first time I got the DONG report, because everyone has a little bit of 12 year old boy humor in them, but now I’m starting to get over it. I understand if you have not reached the point of maturity yet, and you need to laugh about my trip with the DONG. Take your time and come back later. Or never. Your choice.

The view on Chadian road trips.

A good portion of this trip was spent in the car. I don’t mind car trips. I like being able to see the people and the scenery. As the sole girl on this excursion (as per usual), I was given the front seat, which I graciously accepted. And then I not-so-graciously accepted for everyone’s bags to sit under and upon my feet. Just like men to not want to carry their stuff so they give it to their ladies to put in their purse. Joke’s on them though: I never carry a purse. I would-I just can’t get around to buying one, so I’ve been carrying a pouch that had socks and toothbrush in it from a trip on Turkish Air a few months ago. Then that ripped, so I found another small wallet, and then that zipper broke, so I fixed it with a paperclip. I have also not been robbed recently, so I think there is a connection with carrying money in shabby pouches and not being mugged.

My friend at the SECADEV lodge in Adré.
He slept outside my bedroom.

Because of how much time we spent in the car, the night we got back I fell asleep to one of the songs we heard multiple times on that journey, as we cycled through all of the music on our driver’s flash drive. The song I fell asleep to had a refrain that said, “Fi Juba, ajmal medina fi duniya.” I was not aware that anyone classified Juba as “the most beautiful city in the world,” but apparently this guy has, and Chadians love this song, probably because none of them has ever been to Juba. Ok, I’ll stop maligning Juba—it’s not bad, and there are lots of lovable people there.

 

A lovable Kenyan driller in Chad, who lived and worked
in South Sudan during the height of the war,
and he can tell stories.

Now I’ll malign Enrique Iglesias. We were assaulted by several of his songs thanks to the flash-drive. I pondered the lyrics to one particular gem of a song, where he laments the fact that he is in love with someone who doesn’t return his love anymore. The line “Do you know what it feels like to be the last one to know the lock on the door has changed?” was particularly telling about his relationship with this woman. If she broke up with him as fast as possible and changed the locks on the door, she doesn’t just not love him anymore: she never wants to see him again and is clearly so afraid of him that she does not want him to be able to have the ability to get into her house anymore. I hope he soon knows what it feels like to be slapped with a restraining order.  Worse even than Enrique, worst boyfriend ever, was the medley of country songs that followed. I don’t know who the singer was because I try to avoid the country music genre at all costs. I know that it is traditionally accepted for many of my generation to despise country music, and I hate to go with the flow, but it really grates on me. I like bluegrass though…so I’m still not like everyone else! Anyway, I want to say this singer was Shania Twain because I find her particularly pernicious, and not just because she is Canadian. With time and distance from South Sudanese immigration officials, my grudge against Canada is easing. Somehow I survived Shania AND South Sudan.

Man and donkey.
Not pictured: Enrique Iglesias

The music selection wasn’t all bad. I found some interesting Congolese singers I didn’t know about before (Koffi Olomide and Cindy le Coeur) that I will be adding to my music collection. After all, it was one such trip where I learned about Magic System, band of cool Ivorian dudes who is a staple on my play lists now and has taught me lots of important French lingo.

The hazards of rainy season road trips.
Note: this is NOT our car, but our car passed through successfully
the previous day. I'm not sure how this happened.

Kandos telling me not to take a picture while I take a picture.
Too late.
We are good friends.

And the driver and I had some good times. One night in the field, I asked to borrow a knife to cut the mangos Kandos bought for me on the way there because I am too sophisticated to chew off the peel with my teeth. And also lazy.  They came back with a huge dagger, which was not actually great for peeling mangos, but would have been good protection if we had been attacked by Robin Hood bandits with bows and arrows or swords or something. As I was joking about protecting the group with my dagger, the driver said to me, “No. You are not holding that right. If you hold it like that, your attacker can take it away from you.” (Clearly, he saw something in me that led him to believe that I have the potential to be a great dagger-fighter.) He then gave me a long lecture about the proper way to use a knife in a fight. “I always have a knife with me,” he said, patting his thigh knowingly. “You have one with you right now?!” I said. “Well, I actually left it back at the lodge while we were eating, but I have it. You never know when you need to protect yourself.” Clearly.

Demonstrating the proper way to hold a knife.
Except that you can't really tell.

Of course, a knife won’t protect you from bad drivers. After a near miss with a bus that was driving straight at us, taking up two lanes, he turned to me and said, “No! You cannot die. You haven’t had children yet! You need to have at least 4- a boy that looks like his father and a girl that looks like her mother and a boy that looks like both parents and a girl that looks like both parents.” I think he has thought through this a lot farther than I have.

The Chef du Canton telling us that IAS
came at the exact moment they needed us.

As I said, most of my trip was spent in the company of other men. This is a male-oriented field, mostly. Since it’s Ramadan, we didn’t have to stop for lunch and I didn’t eat in front of anyone. So we would break fast together every night. It was usually me and 5-11 men. It’s not bad eating with large groups of men because even though at least one of them told me I need to get fatter so that I can be beautiful, they do not pressure you to eat like women do. I think they are actually secretly hoping you don’t eat much. And I don’t worry about not liking some of the food because none of them were the ones who made it. So not bad.

Break fast meal in Abeche

Break fast meal in Adré--each with his own spoon.

But I did jump at the chance to hang out with women at the wells and when visiting the self help groups. They were all really fun to talk to, understanding my Sudanese Arabic, and sensing my need for female companionship. While well drillers tend to be male, well-users tend to be female. So we met plenty of ladies in the field.

Hanging with the ladies. I'm sure you can't tell which is me.
Alifa got some good photos of me talking with them, but
he has not sent them to me yet.

I like the kids too--who get serious when you take a photo,
and then rush over laughing to see themselves.

My favorite photo.
Baby Mohamed kept making hilarious faces at me.
His mom thought it was really funny too.

Our last day was to be all with ladies, many of whom I have met previously on other visits, and I was looking forward to it, but at the last minute the DONG rep decided we would skip this last day and go straight back to N’Djamena that night. So we did, breaking fast on the way by consuming a large goat together. I ate about 5 pieces of that goat. I got way behind because piece number 3 took 15 minutes to chew. 

And who was so happy to see me arrive home? Felix, the cat who did not pee on anything while I was gone because I took precautions:

Bats and Cats

In sixth grade, I found baby bat on the wall at the school. He was alive. I decided I was going to keep him forever as my best friend, but I had to give him to Mr. Clark while we went to P.E. to play some dumb sport like baseball. I’m pretty sure it was baseball because none of my competitive instinct was aroused during that particular P.E. session. Instead I was planning how I was going to feed the bat with an eye dropper. Also, I was plotting how I was going to make sure that Kristen knew that it was going to be MY bat and not hers, because I think she was misunderstanding that fact. After what seemed an interminable amount of time (because baseball time is longer that Earth time—it steals years from your life span while you hang out in left field waiting for no one to hit you the ball because none of the kids in my sixth grade class were really devoted to the sport), we went back to our classroom to find—oh horrors! Mr. Clark had formaldehyde-ed my new best friend.  Permanently petrified in the fetal position, my fuzzy baby bat was now suspended in a jar of opaque liquid. I was devastated and furious, and if my mother only knew how close she came to having to tell me that she would not allow me to bottle feed a baby bat. Or if, on the very off-chance she had let me keep it, how close my father would have come to being the one to have to find a way to dispose of its dead body. Neither of them had to fulfill these parental duties because I was denied my pet bat in the name of Science. But in honor of this event, after I read the Harry Potter books a few years later, I decided that I would have a bat instead of an owl, and he would carry messages for me and be different from all the other boring wizards, and he would be called “Marley” because that is a cool name for a bat.

My dream. Note: Marley was not from "Bob" but from
the ghosts of the bad lawyers in Muppet's Christmas Carol.
"We're Marley and Marley, our hearts are painted black!"
which I thought was a catchy tune, and a great name for a bat.

Fast-forward a few years, decades, and I have done my fair share of disposing of bat bodies. Or unfair share of it. And I have left more to Antani who does not deserve that at all, but she is a mother and is less disgusted by horrible things than I am.  Why am I cleaning up bat bodies? Do I have a child with a desire for strange pets that she will inevitably accidentally kill? No. I have a borrowed cat with the malicious instincts of a hunter. He loves catching bats and frogs and lizards outside and bringing them inside to munch on. He also loves letting them go when they are half-masticated but maintaining a small spark of life and hope for a future free of cats. If he lets them go inside, it is harder for them to get away, but it is possible for them to get caught in the furniture and die. This is what I try to avoid. Also, he has a horrible habit of not finishing his food. Apparently, he’s never heard about starving cats in Africa who would LOVE to eat the rest of that lizard leg he left on the floor. Instead I have to sweep it up. 

Once I saw him chewing on a lizard. It was firmly in his mouth. I yelled at him and picked him up to fling him out the door, and just before he was out, he let go of the lizard so that it ran in the house and behind the kitchen counters. I KNOW he did it on purpose to be mean. But that lizard was stuck and he couldn’t get it,  and he stayed in the kitchen yowling in front of the cabinet for hours until I got tired of it and pushed them out so he could catch the lizard. And I threw them both out again.

 

Three of Antani's kids who came over to hang out while she
working. Sefora (in blue) was terrified of me at first until
I gave her lots of candy. Then we became friends.
The others liked me right away, and I STILL gave them candy.
Except for the baby. She will get hers later though.
Aren't they super-cute???

I really hate it when he catches things and brings them inside because I really don’t like to see animals suffering, and I don’t like to clean up bloody carcasses, and I don’t like the gross crunching sound he makes while he is eating animal bones. The other morning, he came inside with a creature. I was not surprised at this, but I was annoyed.

The previous day my door lock had broken, and instead of calling a professional, we decided (myself, Marie-Françoise, and Narcisse) that we would spend the next two evenings hacking into the door ourselves to fix it. Well, they did. I watched and handed them tools after looking up the French word for those tools on my phone dictionary. We all failed. Except me. I know what a tournevis is now. But the door wouldn’t close. I didn’t worry about that. The cat had been behaving nicely recently and not doing much hunting. I didn’t bother to block the cat flap on the door. When I ignored his 4:45am yowling for food, he took matters into his own claws and went and got his own. Fine. Antani was coming that day, and I figured that she could help me deal with it, but he brought the thing right by my bed and was chewing loudly, and it wasn’t even 5am yet, and I still had another hour to sleep. So I grabbed my pillow and moved into the living room to sleep on the couch. I was not happy with this arrangement, but I didn’t want to fight because fighting wakes you up, and I still wanted to sleep.

I must have had about 5 minutes of shut-eye when suddenly something landed on my head!!! Screaming and jumping up, I dislodged the cat and the Thing from hair. They moved on into the kitchen where I got this photo:

The cat just sat there and looked at it, and it wasn't moving at all.
So you can see how it is impossible to tell if it is alive or dead.

But, as you can see, this bat seems to have no visible injuries, in spite of the horrible noises the cat had been making while chewing on it in my room. And clearly, it had been recently flying. So I stood there a few moments, taking photos for my nephews and nieces (they were impressed) and trying to decide if it really was dead so that I could sweep it out of the kitchen. After a few minutes of internal debating, I decided that I wasn’t brave enough to find out and risk a bat flying in my face. Bats carry rabies, did you know? And I don’t think my rabies vaccination is up-to-date. So I grabbed the keys, which were fortunately on the table in the living room, and exited that middle door (which had been closed) and ran for Narcisse, who I found in the act of rolling up his bed and getting up. Lovely, nice, wonderful hero that he is, he cheerfully agreed to come see if the bat was alive or dead and get him out of my house (dead or alive). He went in the house, walked towards the bat and found that he was very much alive, as he flew at Narcisse’s face (proving that I made the right decision not to test it myself) and then flew around my house making horrible barking noises that I could hear a little bit over my screaming from behind the screen door where I could watch from safety. Narcisse bravely trapped him over the pile of Naomi’s DVDs that people have returned to her and I haven’t put away yet. He held him by the wings and brought him outside of the house to where I was hiding.

“Do you want me to give him to the cat?”

“No!” I said, not wanting the cat to win this dispute after chasing his prey into my hair. MY HAIR. “Just let him go.”

“Well, he’s dead,” said Narcisse. “I’ll just throw him away.” (He did not add “far from here” but I could see that he was feeling concerned for me in my fragile state, and I think he did.)

It was 5:20am. All of this happened so fast. And there was no more sleep for Amanda.

Of course everyone enjoyed this story of my suffering. Look at this message I got from a friend in Sudan after I told him what happened to me:

Also, I don’t know how I got this reputation as being fearless. Sure, I don’t worry too much about driving roads where I may be hijacked, but there are plenty of things that I am afraid of beside being attacked by a bat and a cat in my own house. I’m afraid of dying in an airplane crash. I’m afraid of being invited to dinner at someone’s house and having to eat something horrible like bananas. I'm afraid of calling someone on the phone to make an appointment. I’m afraid of bugs that lay eggs in your body and also getting cut by coral that will take root in your bones and grow into a tree (thanks SO MUCH, Anders for making me watch that youtube video). I’m afraid of losing my hair and going bald. I’m afraid of those people who dress up in cartoon character costumes and try to shake your hand at amusement parks. Also, I am nervous about people who dress in costumes to go to movies or those movie conferences. Basically, anyone over the age of 12 who is wearing a costume at a time other than Halloween concerns me.

Anyway, we all laughed and after the professional came to fix my door (it took him 15 minutes), Marie-Françoise said, “You can close the door and sleep well tonight.”

That was the plan, of course. But at 7:30pm, I had not yet shut that door. I had just brewed a pot of cinnamon tea and was sitting down to watch a TV show marketed to young teenagers that I enjoy because I’m a very sophisticated person, when I noticed some commotion in the corner. Felix had more prey! (He also had food in his bowl, I might add, so there was NO REASON for this other than PURE EVIL.)

I couldn’t tell what it was, but in true Felix style, he let it go and it immediately started flying around the room. I could tell it wasn’t a bat, but I thought it was a small bird. I jumped around screaming, but no one was there to help me catch it, and I had to protect my tea. So eventually I smacked it out of the air with Naomi’s yoga mat, screaming obscenities at the cat, who was doing NOTHING to help me re-catch his prey, which was a giant fat moth the size of the mouse that terrorized me in Mundri.

After I had it trapped under the mat, I knew that I did not want to squish it, but I needed to get it out of the house. So I got the little broom and the dust pan. I thought it was mostly dead, but when I lifted off the mat, it tried to escape, so I slammed the dust pan over it, trapping it with a tiny bit of space under the rim. It was fluttering like crazy, so I thought that if I could kill it with insecticide, that could work and then I could sweep it outside. But I couldn’t find any insecticide. I did, however, find a large pink spray can of some strange perfume, which seemed like the same concept: smelly chemicals in a can that be squirted at offending creatures. If you were wondering, it did not work.

Tools of moth disposal, though I don't
really recommend the perfume because
it was pungent and it was not as effective as I'd hoped.

Eventually, I got brave enough (because I was worried that my tea was getting cold), and I squished the moth between the broom and the dust pan and ran it out of the house before it could wriggle free. I then slammed the door shut, thinking that the cat was outside. And Good Riddance.

But he wasn’t. He was hiding from me under the couch, because I had chased him around the house while the moth was trapped under the mat and I was trying to decide what to do with him.

I left the cat alone for the rest of the night, and shut him outside of the bedroom thinking that I could leave him in there to whine in the wee hours of the morning and sleep past 5 the next day.

It was a beautiful dream. But at 4:30am, I heard a noise that woke me up. Now, I, as you know, would wake up if I heard a butterfly flapping its wings in Hong Kong, but this was a rather emphatic thump. Then another thump. Then a thump and a creak. And then a psychotic MEOW. Felix had made it in the door. So I ended up getting up thirty minutes later to push him outside, where he wanted to go anyway (since he still had plenty of food and water in his bowls).

Felix sleeping on the couch with his butt on my water bottle.
Did I throw a bat at him and jump on his head?
No, because that's frowned upon in polite society.

So I got up at 5am. And then at 11am, Emelie brought in the mail, with a package from the lovely and very contrite owner of Felix who feels terrible about her misbehaving baby. I immediately ate all the “strawberry cables,” which were great—Haribo-level gummy candy. I’ll save the cat food hearts for Felix just before I head out on this trip with the Chadian government officials so that he will have fond memories of me while I’m gone, and not stay at home brooding about how I robbed him of his prey and threw a handful of water from his water dish at him when the spray bottle didn’t soak him as fast as I wanted to after the bat incident (I was a little hysterical, but it gave me the super-power of being able to throw a handful of water at the little miscreant).

Thanks, Naomi, aka the only person who cares enough about me to send me packages.
Also, I know I look crazy. I never sleep anymore.

On Cats and Sleeping: an Essay

Clearly, he missed me
while I was in Kenya.

I am a terrible sleeper. I think I may have mentioned it before. It is not one of my skills. I never sleep through night. I can’t remember ever laying my head on the pillow and then waking up hours later to the sound of my alarm. But truthfully, I don’t believe that there really are people who can do that. They are either A) lying or B) very forgetful. I think it would be possible to wake up in the middle of the night and check your Whatsapp messages and then fall back asleep and forget that you did that. But because I spend so much time awake in bed at night, and because my memory is superior to yours, I never suffer from delusions of sound sleeping.

I’m pretty sure that my terrible sleeping habits will doom me to a life of obesity, cancer, and juvenile arthritis, as I’ve read many articles about what a terrible thing it is not to get enough sleep. They always offer helpful advice like, “stop drinking caffeine before bed” or “do some yoga stretches to unwind.” These are nice in theory, but they don’t work. I’ve tried. So now I just accept who I am and embrace it, like all the other magazine articles in the world advise you to do. Of course those magazine articles also suggest you buy expensive clothes and/or eye serums to help you do that, but I can't be bothered by that stuff.

Here in Chad, my sleeplessness continues as it has in every other country I’ve ever lived in, but here, at least, I have a companion. His name is Felix. He is the cat in the house where I live. As a nomad, the idea of renting a house for myself is rather daunting. Because if I agree to let someone else pay money to put a contract on a house, that pressures me to committing to living in that country for some time, and that is a stressful idea. So when I found out I could stay at Naomi’s house while she is at home chilling (literally—it just snowed there) in Northern Ireland, I jumped at the chance. And when I found out that I would be watching her cat, I thought, “That sounds fun. I’ve been wanting a furry little pet for some time now”, though I haven’t been able to get one because of the nomadic life. (And mice that eat your food and your clothes and crap all over your house do not count.)

"Give me what you're eating!" ~ Felix the Cat
(I was eating cashews. He ate them too.)

Felix is entertaining. That is true. But he is not exactly a cuddly pet that I had been planning to get for myself. Still, he is interesting. You may love or hate cats, but they are interesting. Of course, they do think they are better than us, and Felix is not the exception to that rule.  But the difference between Felix and most cats is that he has had ample opportunity to be brought down by the neighborhood bully. So somewhere deep inside, he knows that he is not the greatest in the world. He is second to the Nemesis.  Naomi wants to call the Nemesis “Nero” but I feel like that gives some legitimacy to his lounging in our garden. Nero was the emperor of most of the places at that time, after all. So he had some legal claim to lounge wherever he wanted. But this mangy piece of cat fur has NO right to be in our garden, but he comes in anyway.  Sort of like the European colonizers in America that Pocahontas sang to, “You think you own whatever land you land on!” And of course, whenever he is in our land, he fights with Felix, if Felix happens to be out at the time. And Felix inevitably loses. Because his Nemesis gets in his head.  And also because Felix is significantly smaller than Nero/evil European colonizers.

So letting Felix out of the house (where he prefers to be because, it’s hot these days and there is at least a breeze outside) is complicated. Sometimes it is totally fine, other times, it could be a matter of life and death. Because of this, I try to keep Felix inside at night.

"Yes, I do think that zucchini bread looks good.
I'll have some. Or I'll sit here and yowl all night long.
Your choice."

The first night I stayed at the house, he busted out the screen door and immediately got in a loud hissing fight. Since then, I’ve kept all doors closed. But that causes the problem of Felix deciding he needs to get up and get out every morning around 4:30 or 5:00am. He is impressively accurate about the time. However, I try to sleep until 6:00 every morning because, that helps make it more likely that I will have slept about 5-6 cumulative hours in the night, which is pretty good for me. So I find it annoying to be woken up by kitty claws poking into the hand that I throw over the edge of the bed while I’m “sleeping.” The claws are followed by “meowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeow," that doesn’t stop until Felix gets what he wants (me—letting him out early in the morning to hunt bats).  Since noises keep me awake more than claws, I give in easy. Though one morning when he clawed at my foot, I did kick him in the face. (Reflexes, not intentional cruelty. Ok, maybe a little bit was intentional cruelty.) He tipped backwards off the bed, but jumped right back up by my head and went back to meowing loudly in my ear and batting my face with his paw.

On the days when I ignore it long enough to make him mad, he has decided to pee on things in epic cat revenge style—the new bag Desiree gave me to carry drilling parts with me back to Chad from Kenya. The couch over which some clean clothes were draped nicely waiting for me to feel motivated to put them in the closet. NOW I’m always motivated--well-played, Cat. If my mother had tried that method back in the day, maybe I would be a neater person than I am now. And the flip side is that now, if he DOES leave me alone after I’ve ignored him and kicked him in the face, I get worried about WHY he is quiet and if that is because he is planning some more epic cat revenge.

Then there are the days that I let him out early enough, and he was in time to catch some morning bats. I discovered their mangled bodies in a pool of blood on my floor, and was profoundly grateful for the lovely Antani, who comes in to clean the house and told me, “Don’t worry. I can take care of this. He did this to the other girl who watched Naomi’s house a while ago, and she was very upset.” Antani really is the best. And it is so wonderful to have her help me out around the place and discuss the proper French terms for various household items.

The favorite spot of Felix and his Nemesis.
Felix is winning this time. No photos of Nero because
whenever I see him, I throw rocks (or whatever is handy) at him.

Anyway, I finally decided to leave the door with the cat hole in it open—the screen door was closed, but he could go in the little cat flap at the bottom. When I let him out that door in the morning, I usually block it behind him with the can full of rice. He can push it away in desperation if he needs to get in, but if he is holding a struggling bat in his mouth, it would be more difficult. Since developing that system, I have not had any more bats. Thought that could also be because the last time he came in with a bat, I chased him outside, whacking at him with the broom.

Naomi, feeling guilty, as pet owners always do for things her pet did to others while she is gone, suggested I try to leave the door open at night, so that Felix can leave in the morning without disturbing my never-peaceful slumber.  I decided to test it out, because A) I was getting tired of the 4:30am wake-up calls and B) Antani was coming the next day, and I figured she could help me if any bloody bats came in during the wee hours of the morning. But as it turned out, this was not an idea that helped me sleep more.

Clothing-optional weather

At about 1:45am, I became aware of an annoying noise somewhere in my vicinity. “It must me outside,” I thought. The sound of cats fighting—it’s not pleasant and I’ve learned that it is a warning sign for me that I am about to be called into action as the fairy godmother with the rocks. I throw them at the Nemesis. Not accurately, as, in the immortal (paraphrased) words of Oscar Wilde: ‘Anyone can throw accurately, but I throw with wonderful expression.’ And one time, I actually hit it. Other times I hit my own roof over my head and once, in a fit of rage, I threw a leaf, which did not go anywhere. But I yelled while I threw, and that seemed to have the desired affect anyway.

At 1:50am, I realized that the noise was INSIDE my kitchen. I threw on some clothes (when it is 40/104 degrees inside, one does not wear many clothes to bed) and went to investigate. I caught the tail of the Nemesis exiting the cat door (nothing to throw at him, unfortunately) and the tail end of Felix hiding in the bathroom and noticed the new carpet of ginger cat fur covering my kitchen floor, signaling the defeat of the master of the house in his own home by his mortal enemy. So, I took a photo to send to his mom as proof of life and cowardice.

The aftermath. (It looked worse than this in real life. I had to
stay until Antani arrived to explain the situation,
and I was late for work. But I got to tell the story in French,
and I learned some new vocab.)

Then as I was turning off all lights and shutting doors (lesson learned) and heading back to bed, Felix stumbled against my legs and collapsed on my feet, still fuzzed out like a porcupine defending his body. He let me pet him back down to normal size and then we both went back to sleep…until 4:30am when he got brave again and decided he wanted out.

I have contempt for you, foul human.
Now, feed me all your meat and/or tuna
(which sounds like "chinna" when N. Irish Mommy says it)

This has nothing to do with the story.
I just wanted you to see this photo of the
amazing chocolate icing I made.
This is a photo of me making out with it, while listening to Sam Cooke.