I Should Be a Detective

           The other day we were walking through the grounds of the Sacramento LDS Temple. Sometimes you'll see deer here, and nearly always some turkeys. Suddenly St. Bob stopped. “Look at this footprint. Do you think it’s a mountain lion?”

          Uh-oh.  Yep, I did think that. It was fresh, too. He snapped a photo of it with his sunglasses for scale.

          Now, you may think I don’t know my cougars, but I grew up in Utah and everyone in Utah knows several people’s cougar stories. I even blogged about my favorite one here.

          The other possibility is that it’s a dog footprint. However, that would be a pretty gigantic dog, and what would one be doing at the temple? So I looked up the footprints.

          Dogs leave nail prints; this one had none. Cougars have a dip on the top of their heel pad, and this sort of has that.  

          Wouldn’t you know this one was smeared a bit. Maybe the animal slipped. OR IT'S A SPY, AND TWISTS ITS FOOTPRINTS ON PURPOSE.

          But I’m going with mountain lion because there wasn't one turkey in sight, and also, they used to have a sign there like this:

          And replaced it with one like this: 

          Either way, we got back in the car and took off. 

          And that’s a lucky thing, because now I can continue making Youtube Mom life hack videos for you.

Cat-astrophic?

            First a tornado, now a mountain lion.  Clearly my quiet little suburb of Sacramento is trying to make a name for itself.

            Yes, there have been multiple mountain lion sightings recently, so much so that a wildlife expert went on the news to tell folks not to run away, since mountain lions like to attack from behind.  Better jog at home on a treadmill, too. 

  Now, I realize not everyone has a good mountain lion story, but I grew up in the Rocky Mountains, where we call them Cougars, so I do.  And here it is.

It begins with a vegetable garden.  As many of you know, deer love to nibble on our veggies and flowers.  Like cartoon termites mowing down a wooden house, deer can make quick work of your toil and sweat.   

So a friend of mine did some research about how to repel deer and discovered there’s a fertilizer made from the droppings of tigers, which should do the job nicely.  So he petitioned the local zoo for something they were only too glad to hand over, and spread it all around his lettuce and corn.  Voila!  It worked.  So he spread it around his flower beds as well.  Now he no longer had deer.

He had cougars.

Yep, just as the deer smelled a big cat and took off for the hills, so the mountain lions smelled a close relative and thought they’d check it out.  So, if you live in Rocklin and you enjoy gardening, you might want to check the labels on your soil additives.  Maybe just stick with earthworms.

Life saving.  Just one more service I offer.  Be sure to subscribe, and check out the other life skills on my YouTube Mom channel here.