Welcome to the Nuthouse

I have a "past" when it comes to squirrels.

First, there was the time that I awoke in the wee hours of the morning in my childhood home to a scratching noise in the attic. It was one of the last days that I was at home before heading back to college for my junior year, and I was miffed that my morning was getting disrupted. I went downstairs to find my dad, and he shrugged me off - he was getting ready for work and was positive that whatever was making that noise was on the outside of the house. Later that morning I returned from a doctor's appointment and was seated in the living room - ready for a few hours of soap operas, the new Glamour magazine and a diet Cherry 7-up. I had our front door open but the screened storm door was closed so that our older dog, Christie, could pretend she was looking out at the yard (she was pretty much blind by this point). As I sat on the couch, I saw something move VERY quickly out of the corner of my eye and catapult its small body over Christie and onto the screen - at that point, it started making some ungodly noises. I contributed to the chaos by screaming and spilling pink soda everywhere. I guess I scared the crap out of Squirrely McAcornpants, because he turned around and headed back into the kitchen. At that point, I grabbed Christie's collar and ran out the door onto the front lawn where I continued screaming. Neighbors opened their doors (including my best friend who lived two doors down), because clearly, someone was being murdered. My elderly next door neighbor came over, opened the front door and waited for the squirrel to exit our home on it's own. Crisis averted. (Also, my dad headed home early that day after a pissed off call from me to take me to a late lunch as an "I'm sorry I ignored your terror" gesture - we had a great time.)

My second experience was more harrowing. I had recently started dating my now-husband when he took me to the family farm in Louisiana for the opening of hunting season. I didn't care much about it - especially since they got up at the crack of dawn and all I needed to do was keep sleeping and ignore the noise as he donned his ridiculous camouflage outfit. I assumed they were going to hunt deer. I didn't necessarily agree with the activity, but given the overpopulation in the area and the family tradition involved, I kept my mouth shut - until he and his dad returned with their "prizes." The animals they hunted were small enough to hang from their belts. And they looked suspiciously like squirrels. A fact which was confirmed by me when I opened the refrigerator to grab a diet soda and I saw a pink fetus-like creature floating in a pot of water (it was a skinned squirrel). I grabbed the chardonnay instead. That night at dinner, my mother-in-law encouraged me to try some, because "it tastes like chicken." I declined and suggested that if it did indeed taste like chicken, perhaps our respective husbands would better spend their time HUNTING CHICKENS. (Which taste a lot like chicken as well).

Yesterday, was number three in the Great Timeline of Squirrel Events. I was talking to my mom and spied something weird hanging from a tree in our backyard. I went out to explore and saw this:

Crap - a squirrel had clearly wedged itself into the nook of the tree trunk and died. I felt bad for the poor guy. In fact, I went to check on his progress (and to make sure that we hadn't attracted any scavenger birds) about thirty minutes later and I saw this:


My "dead" squirrel had clearly moved. At this point, I called Manbug a/k/a the Squirrelanitor, and we stood in the yard (from a distance - we're not Grizzly Adams!) examining him. He seemed injured - or was just acting weird. We couldn't figure it out. Until a lovely neighbor walking her dog in the clearing next to our house enlightened us:

LNWHD: Is that my cat?

Manbug: What?

LNWHD: Is that my cat in your tree? I lost my cat.

Manbug: No - it's a squirrel who seems to be injured. He's just lying on the trunk of of tree.

LNWHD: Oh no - you wouldn't know it since you just moved here, but the squirrels in this neighborhood do that. When it's hot, they just lay on the tree to cool off.

Really? The squirrels in our neighborhood have a different method of dealing with triple digit temperatures than every other squirrel in Texas?

I'm not judging, but perhaps the residents in the area deal with the same heat by nipping at the cooking wine? But maybe she was right, because guess what I saw about an hour later?