Happy MURDERCAT Friday & Sugar Pearls

The offending feline.

Cats are an invasive species. They really are. They are the rock-snot of the animal kingdom; the kudzu…The zebra mussel… the Scotch Broom and the Himalayan blackberry… They are a bane to indigenous life.

Yes, cats are cute. Yes, cats are agile and entertaining. Yes, they are the subject of many a humourous lolcat graphic. But CATS ARE BAD!

But there is only one area in the world where cats were ever meant to be, and that is where they came from; Africa. Otherwise, cats lurking about in the wild and outside unchecked is not right. Mainly because cats are indiscriminate KILLERS. You can feed them until they look like comical pillows and they’ll still go out and kill Chippy the Chipmunk and eviscerate Peter rabbit’s baby. When someone admonishes my complaints about cat-murder by saying that “it’s natural… it’s the cycle of life…” IT IS NOT! It’s 100% not natural for a cat to be out there murdering things. And that’s what it’s doing.

It was estimated our gentle, furry friends, kill a shocking 4 ½ tons of these little creatures per annum!! 4 ½ TONS! HELLO! That is A LOT of critters! That's four and a half Volkswagen Beetles worth of little furry and feathered creatures, of which most of them are not eaten, merely toyed with and violently killed.

OC—the cat that adopted us, is the most proficient feline murderer I’ve ever known. This cat’s skill for exacting a horrible, painful death on innocent forest creatures is uncanny. If he were human, he’d be employed by a covert government agency as their crack-assassin, hired to take out the likes of Osama Bin Laden, Kim Jong-Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with his fatally precise and keen killing skillz. He would root them out, find them, toy with them for a while, and then all of a sudden... Shing Shing... a horrible, horrible death.

OC brings us (no kidding) a new bird or chipmunk at least every other day. I DREAD mornings and coming home in the evenings, and finding the bottom half of some poor unfortunate finch, or a little chipmunk with its guts hanging out lying on our landry room/mudroom floor.  A few weeks ago, I went out into the laundry-room barefoot and then went about shuffing around the kitchen when I happened to glance down to see an entire bird-wing stuck to my foot.  I was horrified... I was unknowingly impersonating Mercury with the disembodied appendage of some poor little hapless bird! Trust me, nobody likes to walk around with body parts glued to them as they go about their day.

Don’t get me wrong, I like OC, but I also hate him for this killing. We don’t *want* and indoor cat… I don’t like the idea of scooping trays of poop or watching the cat stomp with his poopy feet all over my countertops. Nor do I relish the heartbreak of hairballs. So he is an outdoor cat. An outdoor serial-killer cat.

One of our solutions was to put a collar with a bell on him. However, this was a catastrophic failure. The bell seems only to have honed his killing skills even further and increased his kill-rate.

I just read that we should be feeding him more fresh meats and foods—that cats do not ‘recognize’ processed food. Cats snack over 30 times a day. So I’m going to try that and talk to hubby about changing his diet. This had better work or OC is going to find himself surreptitiously dropped off at my horse barn where he can make do with the massive rats I see aloofly waddling around the place—there, his incredible skill for death can be put to good use (if he isn’t squished by a horse).

On the non-murderous front… I made my own sugar pearls for my Belgian Waffles! Yes, I’ve been on a waffle-kick. I made some for my boss’s birthday and he loved them. My coworker requested I make some to bring to her tomorrow for a special breakfast she’s hosting. The request was so short-notice I didn’t have time to order more expensive sugar pearls from Amazon, so I found a way to make them myself; and it wasn’t too difficult at all.

I took 300 grams (about 10 ½ ounces) of sugar, threw it into a pan with two tablespoons of water, and turned the stove to high. The trick is to stir, stir, stir. The sugar will begin to crystallize on the bottom, and you keep stirring the grains until the pick up the melted crystals and start creating little ‘snerds’. Never stop stirring! It takes about five-ten minutes to do a batch. They are largely finer that the commercial pearls, and they are a bit darker, but they work perfectly well. So I am no longer constrained to buying the pearls from anyone! Woo hoo! Belgian Waffles for all!

UPDATE: We tested the waffles this morning (we forced ourselves to try two waffles, it was a sacrifice ::snort::—the office still smells HEAVENLY)… and they were delicious! Happy Friday all.

Keep those infernal murder cats indoors or feed them raw chicken! Damned cats.