I am going to be spending my entire afternoon in a meeting debating the wording and strategic importance of…a departmental mission statement. Honest-to-God, 4.5 hours on what our mission statement should be, what it should say, and then I think we’re going to chant it or something for 2.5 hours because HOW COULD THAT POSSIBLY TAKE HALF MY DAY????? By the way, and anyone who attended college with me is more than aware that I think this, mission statements are a colossal waste of time, energy, and paper. So I would be pissed if we were spending 30 minutes on this, let alone 9 times that length. So how is my Thursday? I’m pre-pissed about the meeting now, so I can only imagine what level of pissed-off I’ll be spun into by the time 5pm rolls around.

It began with the cats. We moved into our new house in August, and the cats were already there. It should be said, before I go further, that I am an animal lover. Well, that’s not exactly true. I selectively love certain types of animals. Strike all that, I am an animal bigot. Love certain kinds; think others would do us a service be immediately becoming mulch. So, where was I now? Ah, the cats.

There are approximately 15 feral cats living in the general vicinity of my backyard. They belong to no one, not because no one would have them (there are a great many cat owners on my street), but because the cats would take being owned the same way I would being anally probed (they’d be against it, for the record). These are not normal, meowing, skittish balls of fur. These cats are little furry demons with an incontinence issue. We keep the back door of the house cracked so the dogs can go outside and do their doggy business. Unfortunately, the cats take our cracking the door as an invitation to come inside and do their catty business. I will walk into the back room and see 3-4 cats moseying around my kitchen, peeing on various things in an unconcerned manner, and eventually taking notice of me. At which point, the do NOT run, but instead open their demon-operated maws and HISS at me. How dare I interrrupt their peeing? The only thing that will cause them to retreat to the backyard is forward movement in their direction, and even then, they will not move at a pace that edges above “saunter”. They then retreat to the fence and perch on it (remember when Snoopy used to imitate a vulture in Peanuts? It looks like that but more cujo) balefully eyeing anyone in range.

The cats were honestly enough. I have a 11 year old pug, a 14 year old chihuahua, and a 14 week old Jack Russell and they’re not exactly a crack squad of cat chasers. The previous two because they are extremely interested in sleeping, the latter because he hasn’t mastered running without falling over yet (he has no tail and it seems to impair his directional velocity). So we have our dogs, the pack of wildcats, and then last week came the gophers.

I don’t have a lot of prior gopher experience. You say “gopher” and I’m thinking the cartoon variety from Winnie the Pooh that had such trouble with pronouncing his “s” syllables. That was before I came home one night and remarked on a pile of dirt in the backyard. I asked my stepdaughter (to whom I usually refer all questions involving abberant piles of dirt, charred remains, loud noises, and/or flying debris) what the deal with the pile was and she calmly remarked that we had gophers. Sarcasm is a common language in our house (as is Spanish, French, King’s English, and Nonsensical Gibberish) so I merely figured she was employing it, glared at the perching horde of feline intruders and went back in the house.

I didn’t check the backyard again until Saturday. At this time, I noticed there were no less than 15 similar piles of dirt forming a sort of moundy dotted line across the length of the backyard. While I was still taking this in, I looked at the latest mound, and out of it strolled a gopher. Gophers, if you haven’t seen them, look like bloated hampsters with shorter hair. They also possess a singular purpose that hampsters lack. They dig and have copious amounts of gopher sex. The former I know because my backyard is rapidly becoming a Discovery Channel documentary. The latter I assume based on the personnel expansion that their building project has entailed. The cats, by the way, seem amused by the gophers and are not making any move to contest their domination of the backyard. My dogs have proven equally effective with the gophers as they have with the cats. I am being invaded. If you hear no more from me, assume the gophers and cats have formed an alliance and attacked us in our sleep. I bid you a tenuous farewell.