I Saved a Shark's LIfe

It was a dark and stormy night... No, not really, but it was dark outside and I did have the TV's volume up a good notch while I sat on the couch and edited pictures on the computer. The dogs were asleep, Charlie on the other end of the couch and Rufus presumably on my bed.

Then I hear it... beep. Huh, what?

A few moments later ... beep.

Great. One of the smoke detectors is giving off it's low battery beep.

Beep.

I let it beep a few more times before finally getting my fat butt off the couch and figuring out which one is beeping and as it turned out it's the one in my roommate's bedroom.

Fantastic. She's out of town and now I have to go into her room and change out her smoke detector battery before I go to bed as the beep, as quiet as it is, is indeed loud enough to keep me awake at night. Especially with her bedroom door open and mine as well (since she's out of town)

I find a 9volt battery in a drawer and set it on the counter waiting for the DVD I was watching to finish. Yes, I could have paused it, but why? The beep was annoying, not super loud.

Suddenly, out of the blue a hear something move in the kitchen. I mean a real movement, not just a normal kitchen noise like the ice maker turning on or a drip, drip, dripping from the faucet or something else common place. Whatever it was that I heard was loud enough to wake both dogs and even cause Rufus to come out of my bedroom to see what was happening.

The first thing I did was send a chat message to my roommate who's out of town, letting her know that there's a weird noise in the kitchen. It's a running joke in the house that we have a ghost living here and anytime there's a weird noise or a flickering light bulb we jokingly blame it on the imaginary ghost.

"Something in the kitchen just moved and it's own. I mean, Charlie jumped and Rufus came of the room to see what the noise was." ~ Me, 18:50

She replied with a joke about the 'demon' doing dishes for us.

When the movie was finally over I set the laptop down and head over towards her bedroom, grabbing the battery along the way.  I step into her room, turn off the ceiling fan and look at the alarm. It should be easy enough to change the battery and I step back into the dining room to grab a chair real quick. As I step up to the table I see what looks like a fish shaped dog toy on the ground underneath the chair I'm about to pull away.

Fish Out of Water

That's weird, the toy didn't look familiar. I look again and see that it's not actually a toy, it's one of the two sharks in the fish tank. You see, right there on the bar between the kitchen and the dining room my roommate placed a fish tank a few years ago. It's still there. A year ago, or so, one of the silver dollar fish jumped out and landed on the kitchen counter, suffocating slowly until it was found hours later by my roommate.

This time, however, the fish made it from about 5 feet high (the top of the tank) and onto the floor, probably bouncing off the table or the chair on it's way down to land where it did. If that was the noise I heard earlier, then that means it's been out of the tank for at least an hour.

I reach down to pick it up only to have to swat Rufus away in the process to prevent him from treating it like a snack. As soon as I touch the 6 inch shark it jumped.

Was that a death throe? A spasm? Nerves reacting?

I reach for the fish again and this time it doesn't move. It's eyes aren't moving, it's gills aren't moving and it's dry. Limp, but dry.

As I walk it around to the garbage can I pull out my cell phone and call my roommate to let her know her black shark is dead. The other end rings as I step on the lever that opens the can's lid and she answers as I'm about to drop the shark. I stop and explain what happened, "Remember when I sent you that message about a noise in the kitchen? Well, I figured out it was your shark. Somehow it jumped out of the tank and landed underneath the table."

She's not happy and I'm about to drop the shark when it starts squirming and slips out of my hand falling straight into the garbage can, sliding between a couple of things and down into the bag. Crap.

"Well, I thought it was dead, but it just moved and fell into the can," I explained the current situation.

"Can you get it out and put it in water?"

"Maybe. It slipped down into the can."

I had to fish around (he he, see what I did there?) up to my elbow, until I was able to grab the shark and pull it out of the garbage can. The shark's skin was covered in garbage, dog fur and other things I didn't want coming off in the fish tank so I quickly filled a Big Gulp cup I normally use for filling the dogs' water bowl and set the shark in there to rinse of for a few minutes.Without a lot of room to move, the shark sat there, face down, as the dog fur and a piece of lettuce separated from his skin. When I deemed him clean enough I dumped most of the dirty water out into the sink and then slid the shark out into the aquarium.

It sank. To the bottom. Like a rock. A real rock, not a Chevy truck, although I'm sure a Chevy truck would sink to the bottom as well.

For a second I thought it really was dead and I was just dealing with nerve system reactions when I noticed it's gills were moving. And then an eye. I watched for a few moments more and then the shark shook. It was upside down at this point, but moving. I thought about reaching in and adjusting his body right-side up, but before I could his whole body shifted like a shark does when it's swimming. It was still upside down, but it was moving. And then it righted itself.

Nemo Was a Sissy

This entire time I'm giving a verbal account to my roommate over the phone (hence the lack of pictures) and she let's me know she'd be surprised if the shark lasted through the night.

The shark swam around the tank a couple of times, still a little dirty from the adventure in the garbage can, and I leave to replace the 9volt in my roommate's bedroom.

A few hours later I check on it before heading off to bed and it seems fine. The following morning it was swimming around like nothing was wrong.

Amazing.

Black Shark Swimming with Albino Shark, the Next Day

Read More

Sunday Morning

True Story

So, as I start every morning, I took Rufus for a walk. For once we didn't have my roommate's dog with us so I decided to let Rufus be Rufus and chase squirrels, sniff what he wanted to sniff, walk where he wanted to walk and so on. I guess we could call it more of a leisurely stroll than a bonafide walk

With the warmer temperatures compared to the last couple of days, blue skies over Colorado and the clean fresh air, it was a good morning, me and Rufus and dozens of chattering squirrels.

Until ....

Duh! Duh! Duh! Duuuuh!

Since I had every intention of taking Rufus to the dog park later that day we cut our normally one mile morning walk down to about a half a mile, cutting through a nearby neighborhood instead of walking around it, as is our normal routine.

Squirrels were all over the place, running up and down trees, chasing each other across the grounds, chitter-chattering at themselves, us and each other. The occasional crow cawed at either the squirrels or Rufus and I. In short, it was a typical day in the life of Jason and Rufus (minus Charlie).

As we came around a corner Rufus stopped and crouched into his stalking pose. I looked along his line of site and didn't see any squirrels near the base of trees or running around on the grounds but further along, up ahead, I did see a black cat.

Now let me explain: Rufus loves kitties. Not in the oh, look, they're so adorable sort of way, but in the, that is my nemesis and I must destroy my nemesis sort of way. He will bypass squirrels to get to a cat. He will ignore a bacon cheeseburger to go after a cat. For all the things in this universe Rufus loves chasing, it's cats that are his drug addiction.

I know this. Therefore, I usually never let him chase cats. Sometimes I do, simply because it's so fun for him and if I know the cat has an escape route: a door, a tree, under a car -- something. Just like I let him chase squirrels and the occasional bunny. I don't necessarily want him to catch anything, but the chase -- the hunt -- is paramount.

Christmas morning to a seven year old has nothing on Rufus chasing a kitty.

Rufus Laying in the Grass

And then we see this cat up ahead. Not a large cat by any means, about the size of a typical house cat, solid black with bright green eyes. It was actually a pretty animal as it sat on some stairs, about 6 steps up from the ground. The black cat watched Rufus and he watched the cat in a stare down to give any Hollywood gunslinger a run for his money. The cat's emerald eyes as wide as they could open. I walk closer. Rufus still leashed. While I don't mind him chasing a kitty now and again, I don't need him hurting himself chasing one, so I didn't let him off leash. A couple of years ago he hurt his ACL chasing a squirrel around a tree and a few years before that he tore open his leg, slicing the skin on an exposed root, as he charged after a squirrel.

As we got closer to the cat Rufus lunged and the cat bolted up the remaining stairs, Rufus following until he reaches the end of the leash, about 2/3 of the way up to the top. The cat is as far from Rufus as it can get, which is more than eight feet away.

Then from behind me, "What the fuck are you doing!"

Huh?

"What the fuck are you doing!"

I turned to see a slightly less than obese woman dressed in what I assumed was either her church clothes or the attire of a realtor (I couldn't help it, she looked like she was a realtor): black slacks below a black shirt with some sort of lighter long sleeved print over that; some gaudy necklace and enough makeup to service the entire circus. "What the fuck are you doing to my cat?"

She was stepping away from a mid-90s Cadillac and approaching me, "Why is your cat outside?" I asked in response.

"Why are you scaring my cat?"

I asked again, "Why is your cat outside?" I didn't explain this, but it's common knowledge in larger cities: pets aren't supposed to be outside running loose. That not only means dogs, but cats as well. This cat was not on a tie out, did not have a collar on and wasn't behind a fence or anything else; it was sitting outside on some stairs, as free as the wind.

"You asshole, you're scaring my cat!"

"Well, you're cat isn't supposed to be outside running around," I said. I didn't feel the need to explain to her that her HOA (that's Home Owner's Association) would back me on this -- my dog was on leash this entire time and I did not let him come into contact with the cat.

"You're a dick," she said in reply.

"Why do you feel the need to be so vulgar," I asked her to which her response was to call me a 'dick' once again. So I said, Well, if I'm a dick then you're a bitch," which was enough of a catalyst to start screaming at me to leave and get off my property. I explained to her that I was not on her property and she nearly went hysterical with statements of, "I own this, this is my  property and you're trespassing!"

"How come you can call me a dick and an asshole, but if I call you a bitch you get so upset? I'm not upset. I'm calm," I explained to her, which just made her even more mad.

I should explain. I was walking through a condo association's property. Condo owners own the content inside their walls, not the grounds outside, not the sidewalks and not the grass. While, yes, she does have a financial stake in the grounds, she does not singularly own any piece of property outside her home. Technically, she doesn't even own her front porch or her patio. In Colorado these areas are known as "exclusive use, common property" meaning she has exclusive rights to use those areas, but they still belong to the HOA, not the individual homeowner.

Also, at this point, she doesn't know if I'm a resident of her community or not. It didn't matter: I was on a sidewalk and my dog was on leash. We were doing nothing wrong.

She passed me and followed her cat up the stairs where it waited, eyes wide, fur puffy, "Leave!" she screamed at me over and over again. There was no law saying I have to, so I stood my ground. Where I was and what I as doing was completely legal. And I told her that. And she became even more enraged.

For some reason we've become a society of people who walk away. I don't know why, but it annoys me. We're supposed to cater to those people who want their way instead of standing up for our own. We see it all the time as Ms. Grumpy pants walks down the street and the neighbors cross to avoid her; as people stop confronting He Who Yells Loudest in an effort to not get dragged into an argument; as the Constant Complainer gets his/her way because more reasonable people are tired of hearing them complain over and over again. It's always, don't upset those who get upset easily or as we said in the military, catering to the weakest of the group.

I decided long ago these people getting their way just because they were throwing tantrums. They're the ones who are loudest and therefore they're the ones who are listened to and sympathized with -- and they're always the victim. Are we training a society of victims out there? Just because someone is loud and hysterical doesn't mean that person is morally, ethically or legally right. In fact, many times they're wrong.

"Why don't you let your cat inside," I suggested. She turned to open the door to the upstairs unit and then stopped herself. "Ah, that's not your home, is it? So, technically you're trespassing," I smirked.

"Why are yo being an asshole?"

"I'm not, but you're definitely being a bitch," I said back to her, and she became even more pissed, if at all possible at this point.

She came down the stairs, without her cat I might add, "I'm going to call the police."

"Sure, why don't you," I encouraged knowing full well I was not in the legal wrong and her cat was outside off leash. She stalked past me again and to her car where she pulled out a cell phone, presumably, to call the police. She walked right past me again, within arm's length, to the shade of a tree where she could read her screen and started dialing.

The next couple of moments were her giving her address, unit number and then saying, "This man is harassing me. He won't leave and he's on my property."

She's been vulgar to me since her first words, called me names, screamed at me and I'm harassing her?

"Why don't you tell the truth," I said calmly but hopefully loud enough to be heard through her phone. "I'm on a sidewalk, not your property and I'm not harassing you, you're the one calling me names and being vulgar."

She went on, "He's wearing a black shirt and blue jeans, with a black dog and he won't leave me alone," As she said that she, apparently feeling courageous with the police on the phone, stalked straight towards me and stopped just a foot or so from my face, "Leave me alone! Just go away!"

My mouth was now closer to her phone than it would be to my outstretched hand, I was sure I could reach past her head if I wanted to test my theory, but instead I just said into her phone,  "Why don't you tell them that you just came up to me and now you're in my face? I haven't moved one step."

Either she realized her error or the dispatch operator told her to back off because she took that moment to walk away, towards her car. As she moved away she kept on talking into her phone, "I don't know where he lives... I don't know," then to me, "What's your name?"

"I'm not telling you my name. We can wait for the cops to arrive."

Back to her phone, "He won't tell me... I don't know, thirty?" Sweet! She thinks I'm younger than I am! "Brown hair..." and so forth.

She gets into her car and at that point I presume the operator told her to get inside somewhere and wait for the officers to arrive. Having not done anything illegal I had no reason to walk away so I waited for the police. There way no way in the world they were only getting her side of the story. Unfortunately, it was at this point that I thought to pull out my phone and record the exchange.

Once inside her car, she rolls the windows up and starts the engine, again I'm thinking this is just to have the air on and the vehicle secure for her safety. I was wrong. She backs out and pulls away and now I'm thinking she's going to park on the other side of the lot or something. Again, to be safer.

Nope. She pulls out of the lot and turns down the street. I watch her drive off and after she's out of sight I let Rufus know that we're leaving (if she didn't stick around for the police, why should I?) and looked one more time at the black cat that's still outside, still watching Rufus.

To sum up:

• she was terrified for her cat
• she didn't put her cat inside
• she called the police
• she didn't wait for the police
• she called me names: "dick," "asshole" etc.
• she became very upset when I called her "bitch"

Yet, I'm in the wrong. She'll go on the rest of her day and perhaps tomorrow telling people about the mean man who harassed her, leaving out her vulgarity; leaving out that her cat was outside without a leash and leaving out that she repeatedly got in my face.

Read More