7 posts tagged “skwerls”

Today, I hate everybody. 

Construction up the block woke me up early this morning.  For days and days (all last week), they didn't work on the 19th Street project, but this morning, they started at 6 am?  Drilling near the water main, so every pipe in the house rattled.

I left my breakfast sitting on the kitchen counter--my fault.  So I walked up to the Union for some croissants and some coffee to cheer me up.  No croissants.  The kid in the bakery just shrugged when I asked him why.  There are chunks of burned milk in my cafe au lait.  Not my fault.

Outside my office, they're tearing up the road behind the building...and they're getting ready to rip out the little tree outside my window.  The lovely little tree that provides me shade in the summer and a place for birds and skwerls to hang out.  Where will Stumpy come to get my apple cores when the tree is gone?  And it's not like I can complain--they're ripping out the tree to put in a new handicap entrance to the building, which is desperately needed.

Also, there are people who need to communicate with me who aren't.  Who just aren't saying anything important that needs to be said. 

Of course, it could be worse.  I could be unemployed or homeless or in need of a handicap entrance or starving in Somalia or chained by the neck in a Columbian jungle or or or.  It could be a lot worse, but that doesn't make me hate everybody less.  It makes me hate everybody more. 

You know how I can tell?

It was foggy this morning and 45.  After so many weeks of 15 degree mornings with tundra-like blasts of wind, 45 and foggy is like frolicking around in a sauna.

The garbage man and I smiled at each other.  Our city has manual garbage trucks, with two guys riding on back to empty the cans.  I see this same guy every Monday, running the route about four blocks from my house.  It's a quiet, narrow street and I almost always cross right behind the garbage truck.  (You see how predictable my life is?)  Garbage Guy is about 22, skinny, and he wears a Jayne Cobb hat in the winter.  Today I crossed the street behind the truck just as he was returning an empty garbage can to the curb.  We passed each other just as he jumped back on the truck, and for whatever reason we gave each other a huge grin.  Wonder what he was listening to on his headphones.

Stumpy Skwerl was sitting on my window ledge when I got to my office.  He's missing all but about 2 inches of his tail and I often leave him my apple cores on the window ledge.   As a promise for later, I set my apple on the inside of the window ledge so he'll know to come back after my morning break.

I sent off a query to an agent who reps a good friend of mine, so if nothing else, I feel pretty sure he'll ask to see the manuscript. 

Plus, I actually feel pretty good about the manuscript today.

Yup, gonna be a good day.  Hope you have one, too.

There I was last night, lying in bed, all alone, except for the cats.  I was just about to drift off to sleep when I suddenly heard a psycho killer stomping around in my attic.  Thump thump thump thump.  Or maybe it was a monster.  Or some lingering un-laid ghost from a bloody Civil War massacre.  I hate it when that happens.

Because you know what I had to do.  I got out of bed and stood under the attic door in my pajamas, cursing Hubbicula for always being gone when creepy shit happens.  When the vampires came around in Tampa, scratching on the windows, where was he?  In Classifiedistan, being shot at by jihadis.  Lucky bastard.

So, I spent a good ten minutes debating with myself about what to do.  There was no way I could go to sleep with that steady, metronome-like thumping.  It was snowing outside, so I couldn't exactly go out and look up at the roof and try to figure out what was going on.  Finally, I concluded: the odds of a psycho killer were pretty small and the odds of a monster or the ghost of one of Quantrill's Raiders were even smaller.  As for the prospect of a skwerl or a raccoon, the thumping was just too rhythmic.  It's a well known fact that except for chipmunks, critters don't have a very good sense of rhythm.

It must be the attic fan.  It's made strange noises before, creaking, rattling, squealing, but the thumping was just too loud to sleep through.  So, I got a coat and shoes and a flashlight, locked the cats in the bathroom, and pulled down the attic stairs.  I kept the flashlight up, as a weapon and a guide, and crept up the stairs until I could hit the light switch.  No raccoon, no skwerl, no psycho, no monster, and no ghost.  Just a stupid attic fan. 

In the end, I couldn't figure out why it made a thumping sound every time it rotated, so I did what any half-sane do-it-yourselfer would.  I got some twine and tied the fan blades to its support strut to keep it from rotating.  Of course, now the fan isn't doing its job, but at least I didn't have to dream about killers walking around in my attic all night.

I laughed until I thought I was going to pee my pants.  It is that funny, my people.
You must go watch eeeet.

My back yard neighbors have a squirrel feeder that looks something like this:

They are generous people; I rarely see the squirrel altar without a sacrificial ear of corn on it, which makes this story particularly amusing.  Tonight, for the second time in a week, I witnessed an amazing feat of squirrelness.  I was sitting at my desk, ostensibly writing, but occasionally glancing out the window at the birds, rabbits and squirrels frolicking in the back yard.  At a distance, I was able to make out a squirrel, dining at the neighbor's feeder.  When I glanced up the next time, the squirrel had firmly grasped the ear of corn in his mouth and was tugging it off the feeder.  Headfirst, the ear of corn still in his mouth, he scurried down the tree.  Wobbling from side to side, he staggered ten feet to the tree nearest the fence I share with my neighbors, and darted up it. 

Sloshing around like a drunk, the ear of corn totally destroying his balance, he jumped from branch to branch, then leaped from the neighbor's tree to a tree in my yard.  After he descended to my yard, he did a little victory lap around a bush before disappearing under it enjoy his ear of corn. 

The first time it happened, I cheered the little guy on, like he was carrying a football toward my team's goal.  I was saying, "Go, little dude!  Get the corn!"  This time, I just sat and marveled.  Is the atmosphere so terrible over at the neighbor's Squirrel Diner?  Or does the corn taste sweeter knowing it's stolen?

There are some home repair projects that I enjoy.  I like painting, for instance.  It doesn't take a lot of brain wattage and the results are immediate.  I don't enjoy home repair projects that require me to go into dirty places where spiders congregate, like crawl spaces and attics.  The worst projects, however, are the ones that make you feel stupid before it's all over. 

This weekend was a combo repair job: bad and stupid.

As with many old houses, our house's attic is ventilated by a fan and by two open dormers.  To keep birds and skwerls out of the attic, the dormers have wooden slats and screening fastened inside the attic.  This is all fine and has been a successful technique for hundreds of years.  The only problem that develops is when you don't check on the dormers and a skwerl or bird gets through the screen.  Next thing you know, you've got the bird equivalent of the Sears tower in your attic.  I've noticed since we moved in that sparrows occasionally sit on the wooden slats at our north dormer, and it didn't worry me until a few weeks ago, when I was brushing my teeth one morning.  That was when I heard not just birdies sitting outside chirping, but what I thought was the sound of a bird flying overhead, followed by chirping overhead.  It made me nervous.

So, this weekend, we went up in the attic to check things out.  We did discover that there has been bird activity in the past--old nesting materials and a few ancient, dessicated eggs (which I saved for later amusement.)  A few industrious sparrows had managed to eek out a living space in between the wooden slats, outside the screen, but the screens were intact.  Consider: the existing system works, has been working for several decades I would guess.  What did I do?  Ripped out the old screen, tore out the existing nests, and proceeded to install new screen.

Stupid.  Stupid.  Stupid.  You know why?  Turns out, it's really hard to nail a piece of screen up over some wooden slats and make it sparrow and skwerl proof.  Really hard.  Whoever installed the old screen was a master.  I am a rank amateur and my screen shows it.  It looks like ass, and it doesn't look anywhere near as sturdy as the old one.  In fact, the new screening itself is some shoddy crap that doesn't look like it could withstand a full frontal skwerl assault.  It looked so flimsy, we ended up nailing the old screening back up over the new screen.

Even better: can you guess what made the whirring, fluttering sound?  The attic vent fan, which has gotten a little wobbly over the years.  No bird flying around in my attic.  Just the sound of the fan rattling whenever the wind gusts, as it is wont to do in Kansas in the Spring.  To top that, while I was standing in the attic, the birds sitting on the roof and outside in the trees sounded like they were sitting on my shoulder.  That's how clearly I could hear their chirping.  I'm so stupid, it's surprising I didn't try to convince my hubby that we had jets flying around in our attic.  "But I can hear them flying overhead!"  Yes, you can, dumbo.

Lessons learned:

Newer is not always better.  (And I thought I knew that lesson up and down.)
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
If you can hear the birds on your roof through your ceiling, you need more insulation in the attic.

I set out for my evening walk intending to come home and blog about a new study on the health benefits of milk chocolate. I was going to come home and crow gleefully to all you Dark Chocoladytes. You can keep your ol' heart benefits. The Milk Chocoladytes get increased brain function. So there!

But something happened on my evening walk. I saw a thing I'd never seen before--a thing I'd never imagined: two squirrels locked in mortal combat. This wasn't your typical squirrel altercation, with the running and barking and brief tussling. This was two squirrels melded into a churning ball of red-brown fur, with two thrashing tails like spastic appendages protruding from the mass. They were so caught up in the fight that they were lying in the middle of the street, and when I approached them, they didn't even pause. From a foot or so away--in retrospect that doesn't seem like a good idea--I saw that one of the squirrels was quite a bit smaller, and he was clearly getting the worst of it. He was covered in blood, with a gash on his back, an ear ripped off, and one of his eye sockets empty. As I said, no mere squirrel spat this.

I dashed up into a nearby lawn to retrieve a fallen tree branch, stepping in dog shit along the way. With the branch, I forcibly separated the squirrels. The smaller squirrel, Spiffy, darted away, trying to escape, but his larger archnemesis, Nutkin, gave chase. They grappled again. Again I separated them. If I were a bit truer to my hillbilly forebearers, I would have simply knocked both squirrels in the head, and gone home to fix myself a nice squirrel dinner. However, my liberal arts education has watered down that instinct.

Half a dozen times I separated them, but the last time, it was the small squirrel who went after the larger one. He sank his teeth into Nutkin's neck, and there was a great squealing and a spurt of blood. At last, Nutkin lay vanquished. I nudged him with the stick. Dead. Quite dead.

With his sides heaving, the little squirrel finally looked at me, made eye contact, as though to say, "Yeah, I killed him. What are you going to do about it?" To which I answered, "Touché, Monsieur Spiffy." Circle of Life. I walked on, but took the stick with me, in case Spiffy decided to follow me and take care of the only witness to his crime.

Although I write fiction, dear reader, this is all true. Including the part about the milk chocolate.