Fantastic Finds at Casa Marshik

Along with the other wildlife we seem to discover at our house, animals just seem to materialize like crazy. While mowing the lawn yesterday, Charlie found this fun guy on our back fence (Kathy, this should look familiar to you).

It turns out it's a harmless Garden Spider, beneficial for its insatiable hunger for bugs. This spider can eat something like 200% of its body weight in bugs a day - which helps us out considerably. While particularly disgusting to look at and HUGE (~40 mm from leg to leg, about the size of Jaime's middle finger), we welcome her to our humble home. As long as she stays outside and never makes a guest appearance anywhere near where she's not expected!

In other news, after Jaime came home from the store and right before heading to a friend's house to watch some college football, she noticed a mysterious creature scratching at the neighbor's back gate. She thought it was the neighbors dog who recently dug his way out from underneath their gate (and we had to gallantly save from the mean streets of League City)...she was mistaken. It was, in fact, yet another random dog in the neighborhood - sans dog tags or collar. She scooped him up and took him in to our animal-friendly home. "Little Man" or "Boy" as we called him, was quite a gentleman and we knew he must have some people parents around somewhere worrying about him.

Like the good samaritans we are, we strapped an extra collar to his little neck and went scouring the neighborhood for his owners. Door-to-door we trodded on in the 90+ degree heat, with nary a "Yeah I know that dog!" or "He's mine!" in sight. We had a party to get to and Charlie had to finish packing for Hawaii, so we brought Little Man back to our house. We called Animal Control to let them know we had a random dog found by our house, they came out and we decided to keep him instead of shipping him away...just in case his owners were looking for him. So, back in the house he went. Kirby and Sammie were muy curious about the little guy and even got him to play a little bit., which was quite interesting to watch considering he is only maybe 7 lbs and the others are 45-55 lbs (Fatties, we know)!

Needless to say, before we went to our friend's house, we made some "FOUND!" signs for the doggie and posted them around our neighborhood for people to call.

When we returned home from the party, no one had phoned. There were no messages. We kept him crated overnight, which he was clearly not used to because he barked all...night...LONG. Brutal. There was no sleep to be had - truly horrible. This morning we got up on little more than 4 hours of scattered sleep and drove Charlie to the airport for Hawaii. On my return home, much to my joy, there was a note tacked on our front door. Sure enough, our neighbors not 5 houses down had left their dog (without collar or tags) outside and he dug right underneath their fence. They were grateful, though not very receptive to the comment I made about "keeping a tag on your dog, just in case something like this happens". Whatever. Little Man/"Miller" as his real name states, is safely back home after a sleepover at the Marshik Motel.