Earl is the Siamese cat that my son and I adopted last February. He is a fabulous pet and normally earns his keep by just being himself. He has, however, displayed a new talent that catapults him to the top of the "cannot do without" list. Earl is a camel cricket hunter. For those of you in Virgina, you probably are familiar with the camel cricket. They do not chirp like normal crickets and they grow to enourmous sizes for supposedly small "nuisance" insects (see photo). The ones that make it into our house are usually too large to squish. When I first moved here, I would actually catch them and release them back into the wild. I then began to suspect they were bringing friends back into the house with them as the number of camel cricket visitors were growing exponentially. I finally ended up giving them swimming lessons in the toilet. The dogs never paid any attention to the crickets' Superman size leaps across the floor. Earl, on the other hand, has taken on the task of not only killing the crickets, but dismembering them. You will find a body here, leg over there. Cleaning up the carcasses is now the one time I do not mind bending to pick up something up off the floor at this point in my pregnancy.
