Wow!  The chemistry in our house changed overnight.  Women, eh?  Can’t live with ’em.   Instead of watching a shoot-ém-up last night, we watched the Time Traveler’s Wife.  And then they (les femmes) picked Remember Me for tonight.  I’m getting nauseous. 

“Geez, couldn’t you find something that had some cars blowing up?  Or, maybe some guy morphing into a monster or something?  Maybe a sci-fi thing with spaceships?  You know, good movies?“

They both look at me, said nothing and walked past me as if I wasn’t there.

Oh well, I have monsters from the deep.

John stopped by after his prawning efforts and tossed one of his traps ashore.  “Hey!  You guys may want to have a look at this guy!”

In the trap was a beautiful reddish-coral coloured octopus about the size of a very large grapefruit with attendant tentacles.  He/she was in the trap and chock full o’ prawns.  He had feasted before John got him.  We managed to release him from the trap and placed him on the steel grids that make up my stairs and landing at the beach.  We were pretty sure he’d slip through the spaces and skedaddle off.  That is what octopuses do.  As a rule.

Not this one.

He just seemed to get stuck.  We think he was too full of prawns to get through the space that he would normally easily pass through.  So now we had to coax him.

“Oh God!  Don’t let him die!”

So, we poured water over him as we pushed and prodded and tried to ‘herd’ the octopus back into the sea about 15 feet away.  He was a reluctant puss.

I tried lifting and pulling him first by one arm then by ‘gatherings’ of arms but his suckers on the remaining arms clung to the rocks so strongly that I thought I might tear him in half.  So, the brute force technique was abandoned.  We were going to try psychology instead.   “Think!  Think like a….an…..octopus………kinda………..what would you do?”

“It is easier to think like Jesus!  What would Jesus do!?”

We put a large bowl full of water beside him thinking that his natural instincts would pull him in to the water and then I could fling the puss out with the bowl-water.

He headed up hill towards the boathouse instead.

“I thought octopi were supposed to be smart!?” shrieked Sal getting exasperated.

Lina just stood there transfixed.  And looking like a land-locked Swiss.  And I was wearing my slippers on the beach.  Marine biologists we were not!

Opportunity!  Puss passed over some loose kelp.  No firm ground to ‘stick’ to.  I swept him up and rolled him downhill towards the water while Sal poured water over him.  It is hard to imagine an octopus losing his sense of dignity but, as much as that is possible, rolling him down the hill must have been mortifying for him.  He looked ‘redder’ in the face.  Wherever the face is.  Must have been embarrassing – especially being man-handled by a man in slippers.  He eventually righted himself and slipped into deeper water.

“Well, our work is done here people.  Let’s move along, now.  Nothing more to see.”

Thank God that ended well.  For a while there it threatened to be another movie where we all ended up crying.