Monsters Walk Among Us

I have reached a conclusion: There must be a plutonium stash under my house. What else can explain the insane growth of almost every creature in this household? (Now for a couple of the cats, all adults, it's a matter of different cat food & their mom still working out how much they need a day. Not how much they want, mind you...need.) (Their mom has been finding this also works well for herself, but is occasionally stymied by the fact that the one responsible for dishing out her food for the day is, well, her.)

But I digress. Yesterday on my way home from work (yes, work!) (relief work at the moment but more on that later), I stopped at a pet store to finally buy puppy collars. It's about that time when they'll be joining Peter on car rides (Caramel too, as long as she has her Dramamine), and I don't particularly want them off the property without ID. I carefully picked out brightly colored collars: blue for TwoSpot, green for Yoke, and purple for Brownie. These, I thought, are going to be seriously stylin' puppies!

I proudly brought home the new collars (ID tags as well) and got to work. I took each collar out of its packaging, made sure I had the appropriate tag for each, and then took the first collar into the living room to adjust to a puppy. I checked to see how far the first one would go around TwoSpot's neck. Lengthened it several inches. Checked again. Added another inch. Checked again...fine perhaps for a tightened choke collar but certainly not for a pup. Extended it as far as it would go. It still was too tight! Faced with the indisputable facts, as a relatively reasonable person I acknowledged the situation and made efforts to correct my actions accordingly. (ahem*BushCo!*cough!!)

So I think to myself, "Self, it's just that TwoSpot is a humongous boy. Go back tomorrow and exchange his collar for a bigger one." Satisfied, I take the next collars to adjust to the smaller pups. Much to my dismay, these collars are also too small. These puppies are only 12 weeks old!!! Stunned, I glanced around the living room. I looked at the snakes: twice as big as 3 months ago. I looked at the Aquarium of Doom: the red hook has grown by at least half and the tetras have tripled. I pondered this, and suddenly I was really wishing that Geiger counters were standard household equipment.

So perhaps I have found yet another benefit of going back to work: decreased exposure time to something akin to kryptonite (would that be the red one?). Tomorrow I shall return to the pet store & exchange the collars for medium ones. I can only hope that they won't have outgrown those by tomorrow afternoon.