title: Lizards for Lunch: A Roadrunner's Tale
author:  Conrad J. Storad 
description: Conrad J. Storad grew up in Barberton, Ohio, amidst the belching smokestacks of tire factories, steel mills, and auto assembly plants. He didn't see his first javelina, saguaro cactus, scorpion or rattlesnake up close and personal until 1982, when he began graduate school at Arizona State University. Currently, Storad is the editor of the national award-winning ASU Research Magazine, and is the founding editor of Chain Reaction, a science magazine for young readers. He is also the author of many science and nature books for young adults, including the titles: Don't Ever Cross That Road!, Don't Call Me Pig!, Little Lords of the Desert, Tarantulas, Scorpions, Sonoran Desert A to Z, and Saguaro Cactus. Storad lives in Tempe, Arizona with his wife Laurie and their miniature double dapple dachshund, Sophie. They enjoy hiking and exploring the wilds of the Sonoran Desert. Beth Neely and Don Rantz met while studying Fine Art at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona . They soon discovered a mutual attraction to the outdoors, gardening, cooking, reading, and each other. They married in 1993 and began their artistic and lifelong collaboration. Presently, they reside in a small historic bungalow in Prescott, Arizona with their two cats, and a backyard menagerie of birds, lizards, raccoons, skunks, coyotes and even a small herd of javelinas. These surroundings provided them with the means from which to draw inspiration as the illustrators of the children's book Don't Call Me Pig! which preceded their work in Lizards for Lunch: A Roadrunner's Tale.
zlib_text: PASSERBY by Larry Niven It was noon of a hot blue day. The park was lively
  with raised voices and bright clothing, children and adults and the geriatrics
  generation, of which I have the honor to be a member. I had come early enough
  to claim a bench, and was old and feeble enough to hold it. I had brought a
  sandwich lunch in a Baggy. I ate slowly, saving out an orange and a second sac
  of beer for later. The populace danced before me, never dreaming that I was
  watching. The afternoon sun burned warm on my scalp. A lizardlike torpor stole
  over me, so that the sound of adult voices and children’s screaming-for-the-
  hell-of-it dimmed and faded. But I heard the footsteps. They jarred the earth.
  I opened my eyes and saw the rammer. He was six feet tall and massively built.
  He wore a scarf and a pair of blue balloon pants, not too far out of style,
  but they didn’t match. What they exposed of his skin was loose on him, as if
  he had shrunk within it. Indeed, he looked like a giraffe wearing an
  e