This morning the cats were hanging about staring lustfully at my cereal bowl and its milk, and I said, “You two are vultures,” to them. I was then reminded of how, when I was a child and sulking, my mother would say to me, “If keep sticking your lip out any farther, a condor is going to come sit on it.”

This annoyed the holy living bejeezus out of me. Not because I wanted to sulk (though that was part of why it annoyed me, of course), but because I knew perfectly well that 1. condors lived in California, and more importantly, 2. there were only about EIGHT OF THEM LEFT IN THE WORLD, and there was *no way* one of those eight was going to come sit on *my* lip. In Alaska. Thousands of miles away.

Now, if she’d said a bald eagle… :)