Posted on February 7th, 2010 by Scraps.
Categories: Old Posts.
I am housesitting for Brad and Deborah. They have fish and lizards: ornamental pets, the kind you can't really get empathetically connected to, but are fun to look at. Velma spent considerable time trying to figure out how fish think; she soon amended this question to whether fish think (conclusion: No).
The lizards require crickets. Brad and Deborah helpfully left a supply, so we were not obliged to hunt our own in the parks of New York (where I have never seen so much as a grasshopper). They were in a little plastic box, with a few torn up egg cartons and chopped potatoes. Crawling with crickets.
I had not given much though to extracting the crickets. It seemed straightforward enough. Ha. They had no interest in climbing up the little tube that had been provided for extracting them. Nor did any other simple method of just extracting three or four come to mind. We tried covering part of the opening and pulling out one of the egg carton bits, since the bugs seemed sedate. Ha again. They lurched to life, crawling and bounding about alarmingly. One made a desperate bid for freedom, leaping through the opening, barely missing my face, hitting the table and falling to the floor.
We had no insects in hand, but we had one on the loose. If I'd been a seven-year-old, I'd have caught it in my hands, but that didn't occur to me. The narrow tube was inadequate; the bug hopped away before the plastic prison could descend. I went to the kitchen to get a glass; when I returned, five seconds later, I couldn't see the cricket. "Where did it go?" I demanded of Velma. "I don't know," she said, "I lost it." "But I was only gone five seconds!" I cried in despair. We searched unenthusiastically and unsuccessfully.
Eventually we managed to extract a few hapless crickets and make the lizards happy. But there is one rebel, one rogue cricket skulking about the apartment, just waiting for the lights to go out; then we will listen for the sound of miniature ladders and grappling hooks, and the tiny cries of insect escape. Revolution!
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