Peacock screams.....

....and other things that go bump in the night.

As I type, the peacock down the road is screaming.  I believe they do that when they're looking for a mate. That particular peacock is a male, and his tail feathers have grown out long and luxurious. Surely, if there was a peahen within a few miles of here, she would be flying to the neighbor's property to check out that screaming bird. My guess is that no one around here has a peahen... which means that the neighbor's peacock will continue to scream his feathers off until he finds a mate. Oh goodie.

The orange cat.... he wrapped his soft little orange and white paws around my leg the other day, looked up into my eyes, and then tried to bite me. Thankfully, his teeth ended up caught in the leg of my slacks rather than the skin of my leg. And that cat is lucky I wasn't wearing my best go-into-town jeans, because I swear I would have taken the broom I was holding and smacked him into the next county. That cat is just so exasperating.... one would need the patience of the proverbial saint in order to put up with his bad cat-manners.

The raccoon.... he doesn't have his midnight snacks on our back porch anymore, for the simple reason that I no longer leave food out there at night for the orange cat.  As soon as it gets dark, I bring the bowl of Meow Mix in the house. If the orange cat comes by, he'll stand by the back door and meow for all he's worth, getting not only my attention, but a dish of cat food as well. But when he's finished eating, I bring the bowl back into the house. Which means that the orange cat isn't able to have a midnight snack, either. (Which may account for him trying to bite me the other day.)

The neighbor's goats.... they've been jumping the fence surrounding their pasture lately. And the first property they come to is ours... so we've had goats munching the grass in our yard and by the gazebo. My husband went out there the other day with an air-horn... one blast of that had the goats running back down the hill and jumping over the fence to get into their own pasture. The air-horn, however, sent both Mickey and Gatsby flying under the guest cottage and I didn't see their whiskered faces till dinner-time.

And why do we have an air-horn way out here in the country? Because my husband uses that to scare away the dozens of huge crows which fly into our yard to feast on the nuts which drop from the pecan trees on our property. Let's see... which would I rather listen to.... the caw-caw-caw of the crows, or the insistent ear-splitting blast of an air-horn.... (I'll let you guess).