Good morning everyone and Happy Sunday! It’s a rather dull, cloudy morning here, along with some smoke. I heard some thunder earlier too but it wasn’t close by, sounded like it was down over the lake. During the night I woke up and Muffin was meowing. That’s her victory meow, which means she has caught a mouse. So I get up, I don’t want her to eat the mouse, so I have to get it and toss it outside. She’s so happy that I got up so she puts the mouse down for me to look at…and the mouse ran away, under my desk. Great. I go back to bed hoping she will get it again.

At 3:15 I hear her victory meow again. I get up again. She puts the mouse down, all happy and I praise her and pet her which she just loves after catching a mouse. Then I go to pick it up and it runs away again. Muffin is usually very quick at killing mice, she doesn’t play with them. Great. Back to bed I go. I don’t know if she caught it again or not, never heard anything more, but I was kind of tired so I might have slept through it. But if I did, then she ate the mouse, which I don’t like. Sigh.

Then this morning I go for my shower and what do I see? A spider in the shower with me. It’s 2 and a half inches long, which is rather large, too large for me. I don’t like spiders of any kind, but when they get that big and larger, then they are just completely scary. No, I didn’t take a picture. When I spider is inside, he gets squashed, which is what happened with this one. But, this one produced a horrible stink when I squashed it. Never had that happen. Afterwards I come out to the living room and Muffin is looking outside, with her ears back. She’s scared.

That can only mean one thing. A bear. Sure enough there was a bear looking for apples on the smashed up apple tree. This one isn’t the big bear that pushed the tree down, but it’s bigger than that little bear that used to come around. It was a very nice looking healthy bear. Nice shiny black fur, well fed, about 300 pounds. He grabbed branches in his mouth and snapped them off so easily. Now this is 6:30am, so it’s daylight, although dull because of the clouds. But I figured I could get a nice picture of this bear. So I got my camera, and heard footsteps. Rats, he was on the deck already. I decided to forget about a picture right then and hoped he would go back down to the apple tree, but he didn’t.

The gulls and chipmunks were waiting impatiently for their food. But I really didn’t want to go outside until I was sure the bear was gone. I saw him walking away, then heard the neighbors dog down the street start barking, so I knew the bear was over there now. Safe to feed my critters. Now I’m nervous about going out on the deck in the early morning again. It has been so nice to sit out there with my coffee. But I think that will stop now. Sigh. Can’t go walking, can’t sit on the deck. This is getting bad. Inside there’s deer mice, which are very bad critters to have around, and large spiders. Sigh. Oh well, gives me something to write about! And the sun continues to shine, even on a cloudy day. It’s still a beautiful summer morning. Have a wonderful day everyone and God bless!

Steve and Muffin. (the top featured image is a white dahlia)

©2021 Steve McLeod.