These cat blankets are Topaz Approved.

This morning, I bicycled to work and parked my bike in a rack. As I was taking off my helmet, I saw reflected in the library’s windows what appeared to be an impossibly large bird sliding out of the branches of a nearby oak tree and onto the ground. I turned around to figure out what I’d seen and inched toward a low wall, beyond which a very large bird did in fact stand. I stood there and stared at her. She stood between 18″-24″ tall, with motley brown feathers and a hooked beak. I asked her what she was doing there. She looked right, left and right again, but she didn’t answer. Birds and squirrels overhead shouted and squeaked. Suddenly, I had an odd feeling I wasn’t seeing the whole picture so I inched closer to the wall so I could see her whole body. She was standing on a squirrel, which was making a frantic effort to escape. Speechless with horror, I stood there until the department head I’ve referred to for decades as the Source of All Evil walked toward me on the flagstones, asking what I was looking at. I pointed. She’s got one of the squirrels, I said. The Source of All Evil gasped. The giant bird startled and took off, taking the helpless squirrel with it. The shouting in the tree stopped abruptly. It was more than an hour before I stopped imagining the giant bird tearing apart my flesh. Later, Lupe appeared in my cubicle doorway, having seen a woman jogging in rutched shorts, a tank top and no bra. I would have traded her visit from 1987 for my sticky corner on the Circle of Life.

Are those red carrots or carrot-shaped beets?