The weirdest damn thing happened today, and though I’m not certain these two events are holistically motivated, I can’t well explain their connection.

You all know me as an animal lover. My custom title on the awful forums is “Defender of the Dog”, based on my interactions with a certain person who’d brought harm to my loyal hound. (Someone else bought me the title, in case you were wondering.) But yeah, I love animals, and save them when I can. I don’t step on crickets. I go out out of my way to rescue the ladybugs.

So in walking down the ramp from the data center today, I noticed a very small baby gecko or lizard. He was grey with orange spots, and smaller than one of those green army men. I scooped him up with my access badge and carried him out to the grass. Rock on, spacey saves another animal. All is right with the world. And then I get in my car to go home for lunch. I’m cruising along at thirty or forty over the speed limit, just minding my own business when all of a sudden a lizard comes darting across the road.

How many times have you ever seen a lizard dart across the road? Me, never. Not once have I ever seen a damn lizard cross the path of my vehicle. But today one did. One of those adults, probably five or six inches long. And – yeah, you guessed it – since I’d tipped the balance of the animal kingdom, he became a permanent decoration on the road. WTF? How is that possible?

I didn’t feel too terrible about it, I mean – come on, it was a lizard. And I wasn’t aiming for him. I’d certainly have felt a lot worse about it had I crunched the little guy on the stairs, though. It’s like you can’t save one without killing another. And technically speaking, in the chaotic math that governs our happenstance, had I not squatted down and scooped up that baby lizard, I’d have gotten on the road faster, and the big daddy would have surely run across the road behind me. And the baby would have been squashed by some unseeing stepper.

On the way back from lunch, I passed that same area where I’d killed the lizard (God rest his soul) and there, sitting on the edge of the grass (a sort of woods runs along the road by this park there) there sat the statuesque figure of a large cat. I had to slam on my brakes so I could look at this thing. He looked up at me and then backed up into the woods a little bit, then sat there surveying the area, looking at me with a skeptical eye. I’m not kidding, dear readers. This was a bobcat sitting there staring at me. I called H24 to tell her about it. Of course the camera was at home on the desk. Meh. I didn’t know they were common in these parts, but apparently people see them all the time around here. It was a pretty nifty way to end an otherwise just weird lunch hour.