the great cricket hunt

for the better part of the last week, much of my limited time at home spent not watching movies has been spent hunting down crickets. why might i be hunting down crickets? well the answer is simple:

Hippo the tree frog eats crickets. every day i put a dozen or so crickets in his terrarium for him to chow down on, and usually he's pretty good about finding and eating most of them. occasionally one or two escapes and manages to get under a piece of furniture, temporarily escaping a date with the tree frog's sticky tongue.

by my count this week, i've lost two crickets in the feeding process, meaning that theoretically there should have been only two crickets hopping around the house. one of them i know has been under the fridge chirping for three or four days straight. he was introduced to the bottom of my shoe last night (under normal circumstances, i'd just catch them and throw them back in with the frog - but this one was pissing me off).

somehow, i found three other crickets this morning. well, i shouldn't say that i found them - rather the cat found them. it's kind of funny watching a 20 lb cat bouncing around the living room after a cricket. the good thing is that he's smart enough not to eat them. he tends to just hold them under his overly fuzzy paws until he's ready to start bouncing again. thanks to his keen and non-lethal cricket catching skills, hippo had three more snacks added to his plate this morning.