My self-imposed summer hiatus has ended.

With my oldest back in school and enjoying 2nd grade, I now find myself once again able to cobble together tiny bits of time to write or take a poop. (Or occasionally do both simultaneously because I multi-task as only a single mother with a laptop can.)

Summer at El Rancho Fiasco began peacefully enough with melted popsicles, skinned knees, chased balls, the ever-present odor of chlorine, and the sweet relief of not rushing three kids out of the house by 7:30 each weekday morning.

Then the dead meadowland creatures started to appear with frightening regularity on my back deck.

First, the baby bunnies. Some unfortunate field mice. A ground squirrel here and there. The odd prairie vole. An adult cottontail who, judging by his (her?) nearly severed back leg, put up a heck of a fight before being ushered through the pearly gates of Rabbit Heaven.

The cause of so much demise? The perpetrator of this bloody spree? I discovered I have a serial killer in the family.

This year my dog had her very own Summer of Sam.

This latent taste for the kill probably should not have come as such a surprise given that this same dog also attempted several summers ago to 'herd' a pesky yellow jacket and spent half the day (and many hundreds of dollars) in the vet's office after it stung her multiple times in the mouth and throat before finally being swallowed.

Throughout the warm months, the slayings continued and quite an impressive "kill list" was created:

1 prairie dog

5 field mice

3 baby bunnies

1 adult bunny

1 HUGE fuzzy bumble bee

4 ground squirrels

1 baby vole

2 adult voles

2 garter snakes

9 rats

And a partridge in a pear tree.

(Okay, so I'm just kidding about the partridge. But she did get pretty close to nailing an inattentive pigeon.)

Don't misunderstand my flippant take on the events of this summer. I am what some might refer to as an 'animal person'. Believe me, I would much rather be giggling at the antics of the scampering squirrels or making goo-goo noises at the newly weaned bunnies quivering under the bushes than preparing to don my rubber 'another one bites the dust' gloves in order to stuff some lifeless body into a plastic Safeway bag for interment in the garbage can. A few tears may have been shed for the departed.

But the empathetic, Earth Mother stuff came screeching to a halt when the dog began depositing RATS at my back doorstep. Yes, rats. Only, unlike in the movie Ratatouille, these rats were not animated, not remotely cute or endearing, and most likely not even French. They were simply rats. And, I might add, big enough to require two seats each if they were flying coach.

My efforts to catch them with rat traps were largely unsuccessful. In fact one morning I went out to check my trap site and found only rat turds lying atop the peanut butter I'd used as bait. Almost as if a rat were saying (in a French accent of course, so as to keep to the Ratatouille reference): "I sheet on your pah-theth-teek ah-teempt to keel moi!"

I have to admit, the more rats my dog caught, the happier I became. I don't mind finding the occasional wolf spider in the house, but a rat?? Yeah, no thanks.

Anyway, summer has passed for another year and the killing has ended. School is back in session, the leaves are falling, and Orion looks down at me from the southern skies. All is peaceful and non-violent again at El Rancho Fiasco.

But it occurs to me now, that in some small post office in Little Furry Animal Land there is quite possibly a poster on the wall with my Australian Shepherd's friendly mug on it offering a reward for her death or capture. So, on the chance that the residents of Little Furry Animal Land once in awhile surf the net, I will only offer this kind warning:

Do Not Mess in the Yard of THE DOG,
For you are easy to capture and satisfyingly crunchy.

p.s. As promised, the above post is heartwarmingly dedicated to my favorite lumberjack, Mr. Mick Rule, with my sincerest apologies for its' tardiness.