When the Squirrels Come Back to Cats in Windows
(Feel free to sing title to the tune of “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano”.)
I remarked to the Prof several times this summer that with the old oak gone out front (see entry from January 17, 2011: Like An Oak On The Wire regarding that sad day) the squirrels on our property seemed have vanished. The only squirrels I saw all summer were across the street in the neighbors’ yards. I was a bit sad at their defection, but after having pulled up dozens of oak sproutlings from my gardens the year before (due to the squirrel equivalent of leaving Chinese take-out forgotten in the back of the fridge) I wasn’t completely heart-broken by being abandoned.
But now, with fall finally underway, the squirrels have returned to glean what they can from the oak tree about ten feet away from my deck. I’ve seen them running about the property with bunches of acorns clenched between their teeth and I’ve observed them rummaging about in the garden, so I have resigned myself to another summer of sprouticide in 2012. The squirrels have made our deck one of their staging areas though, and the cats are delighted at the return of the furry-tailed tree rats.
The remains of our freak snowstorm over the weekend still cover much of the ground and my deck. Despite the pre-storm promises by weather forecasters that this would all melt off on Sunday, it would seem that there will be plenty of snow still on the ground this Halloween night. The official snowfall for my town was a little over six inches. I really don’t think that we got that much at my house, but we did easily get four inches. I shook the arbor vitae by my deck off once during the storm, and that seems to have saved them from any real damage, but there are many tree limbs down along the roadsides. The Professor is getting frustrated with the weird weather in these parts and while I try not to encourage his rants I have to admit that a part of me wouldn’t mind just a few months of whatever the traditional weather of the season is.
Speaking of seasonal traditions (OK, a bit of a transpositional jump from the previous paragraph), this coming weekend is the annual Punkin Chunkin festival in Delaware. It runs Friday through Sunday. Every year I say I’m going to go, and yet I’ve never been there. I have to work Friday and Saturday, but once again I’m toying with the idea of going down Sunday. Decisions, decisions, decisionsâ¦.
Ah, yes. The annual autumnal gathering of all creatures great and small. I have a large tree in my yard. You can actually see it clearly on Google Maps/Earth. Dozens of birds nest in it every year and more come to roost in it the rest of the time. This time of year they bring walnuts with them. Many of their walnuts end up on the ground. Once there my little darling Miss Ellie collects them and brings them inside where she proceeds to crack them, eat the meats and leave the shell fragments where they lay– in my bed. I’ve become an expert at the extraction of shell fragments from bedding. I’m starting to think about Kevlar bedding.
P.S. I’ve been AWOL for a couple of months because Gmail has decided, in its infinite wisdom, that even though I open every DD email, it somehow is spam. *rolls eyes* Hopefully, telling them repeatedly that DD mail is NOT spam, they’ll get it right from here on out. Time to catch up. Toodles.