That's Barry. I hope you know that.

Stay away from Colorado, then!

Soooo dry ... especially in the winter.  I finally got our humidifier
hooked up again, but it doesn't do a whole lot.  Moisturizer is my
friend.

It makes it works, I think, that I grew up in Virginia (extremely
humid) and always used moisturizer even there.

LOL! Incredible! Did you find out how the cat came to be there?

I am convinced that for any weird given situation that someone on this
group mentions, there is someone else who has experienced it, no matter
how weird.  The last thing I was expecting was a story of someone who
had a cat fall out of the ceiling on them!  And yet, here it is.  The
accumulated life experience in the group amazes me sometimes.

Bridget

That must have been kind of fun, actually. I might be startled at first,
not knowing what was falling out of the ceiling, but once I realized it
was a cat, I'd enjoy it. Although then I would be obligated to bring it
home and take care of it. :) What happened to the kitty in your computer
lab?

Joyce

First snakes than cats  what or who is next
It will be your luck and it will be Santa :-)

I'm so sorry, Jeanne. I might not be very interested in snakes as pets,
but I can certainly understand grief at pet loss, especially someone who
has been with you for so long.

Poor Ozzie!  Poor snakie!  But I didn't even realize that they live
that long!  I enjoyed hearing about them as much as anything, and I
would have liked to have read more stories about Lita too.

The words "Ozzie and Lita cornsnakes" just sound good together, and
the phrase still pops into my head from time to time.  If I were on a
game show and was told that I had one second to name two snakes, I
would blurt out, "Ozzieanlita!" and then I would be eliminated from
the next round because the show host actually meant that I had to name
two species of snakes.

"PatM" <trufflecatpat@yahoo.com> wrote in message

Yes yes YES!  When we would turn on the lights, we would hear them
scattering.  Turn off the tap in the bathroom and they'd poke their heads
back up.  Go to have a shower and they'd run down the drain.  Finish
showering, and they'd pop right back up.  I used to hate going to sleep at
night since they crawled all over everything - the walls, the bed frame ...
a few times I thought that I had one crawling on me too.  We actually got
rid of them with those little cockroach motels, believe it or not.  We found
dead cockroaches for months afterwards.  Ugh.

Susan M
Otis and Chester

How did you know they were German? Were they speaking German? :)
I wouldn't know one cockroach from another.

When I was in my early to mid-20s, I lived in a grungy slum in a
scruffy neighborhood in Boston. We were inundated with cockroaches - I'm
not sure of their nationality, though. :) It was gross, as I hadn't had
to deal with them before. But strangely, I kind of got used to it. One
thing I noticed is that they never crawled on me. They stayed away from
other living things. I hardly ever saw them in the bedroom or living
room, so I didn't have to worry that they'd crawl on me while I was
asleep <shudder>. And if I turned on the light and waited a few seconds
before entering the kitchen, they'd all scurry into the cracks, and then
I could go in without having to deal with them.

I was mighty happy when the landlord finally sent an exterminator to
the house, though! We didn't see another one for two years after that.

Ew, that is pretty bad. I didn't get much of that. We sure did have a
lot of them in the kitchen, though. I had a battery-operated clock on
the kitchen wall, and my roommmate and I always noticed that roaches would
be walking along the wall to and from that clock. Well, one day roommie
wanted to put an end to this, so she took it off the wall and sprayed
Raid on the back of the clock, into the internal mechanisms. I couldn't
stand the smell of Raid, so I left the room, and happily, I missed
what came next. According to my roommate, roaches came pouring out of
the clock by the dozens. It was hard to imagine that many of them could
even fit in there, because it wasn't a very big space. Or maybe it was
one of those magic spaces that's small on the outside but huge on the
inside. :) Needless to say, that was the end of that clock.

I haven't seen any cockroaches since I moved to California in 1992.
I've always figured that was because it's a semi-arid climate here,
and I think they like humidity. But if they live in Denver, then maybe
it's just that my economic situation is better than it was in the 1970s,
and I've lived in better places.

Joyce