Strange Visitor From A Reptilian Planet

We had an overnight visitor last week, a fairly large desert tortoise.

This came about when the household's female members (Hilde, Kay, Tabbi and Holly) went off to a friend's place for the evening.

When they came back out to go home, this guy had wedged himself in the space between a tire tread and the carport.

Their friend recognized him as coming from the crack house several houses down the street, the crack house where the residents had been raided and arrested recently, and were still in jail awaiting trial. A neighbor kid had taken the tortoise in, but the tortoise kept escaping from the kid's back yard.

So it was decided the tortoise needed a better home. Not us; between Mim and the cats, ours isn't the best choice for a tortoise. (Also, they're a protected species, and this guy was probably being kept without a permit by the people in the crack house.) But we could shelter it for the night in the backyard's sunken garden (a filled-in swimming pool), which has a low fence to keep the dog out, until we could find an appropriate rescue organization to take it in.

Come morning, I went out to take a better look at the tortoise.

Y'know what? Tortoises are cool. Crack House Charlie (my nickname for the tortoise) ambled back and forth across the garden, checking out the new territory. I fed him some of the cauliflower trimmings we'd set out for him; he seemed to like being hand-fed.

A tortoise is a very calming thing to have around; they're a walking embodiment of "phlegmatic". They have the face of a wise old Zen master.

How could you possibly not love a face like that?

Kay went online Sunday morning and eventually contacted the Phoenix Herpetological Society; one of their members who had a permit to foster desert tortoises came over in the afternoon to pick Crack House Charlie up.

It turned out Crack House Charlie was actually Crack House Charlotte. My plans for a new career as a tortoise sexer after retirement now lay in ruins.