Animals really love our house. Last year, we had a problem with something — probably a cat — leaving dead mice and birds in our carport. Cats conduct courtship rituals in our yard. We occasionally hear noises in our attic, probably a squirrel. One of our cats killed a macrocephalic mouse one night. And, of course, being Florida, there are the occasional palmetto bugs.

And we now have a pigeon. Although our house has central air conditioning, there's a small air conditioning unit in the wall between the house and the carport. A matronly pigeon has set up her nest there, and is busy hatching her eggs. When she was building her nest, she'd fly away as soon as we opened the door; now, however, she sits stock-still, like a realistically painted sculpture. It's really uncanny how perfectly motionless she remains; most other birds I've seen look like they've just drunk about six gallons of espresso.

I had another visitor last night. I was watching the X-Files when I felt a tickling on my bare arm; I thought it was my cat's whiskers, but when I looked, it turned out to be a spider with a legspan of about 2.5 inches (which doesn't sound very large, but when it's crawling on your arm, that's another matter entirely).

Speaking of the X-Files, a few weeks ago, they were running teasers for "the final 12 consecutive episodes", then "the final 11 consecutive episodes", and so forth; however, there will be no X-Files episode next week. Somebody at Fox needs to look up the word consecutive. Harrumph.