squirrels – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

It was lovely yesterday; last week was basically the first nice week of the year, and it’s projected to be seventy degrees tomorrow. So we decided to take the boy to the zoo, which was open for all of three hours to people with memberships.

I like our zoo. It’s nothing enormously special as zoos go, but for a town this size I’d say they do pretty well, and most of the animals were at least out of their enclosures and hanging out where people could look at them. The emus were booming, too, which is always a neat thing, because I think emus are neat animals and they’re startlingly loud.

But I don’t actually want to talk about any of the regular animals. We were walking past the anteater (who came outside to piss as we walked past; every time we go to this zoo, we get to see the anteater take a piss) and past the (empty) macaw enclosure when I heard a weird noise from overhead. I thought at first it was the macaw, but after looking around a bit more we realized it was a squirrel.

A squirrel, in a tree, busily eating a Styrofoam cup. The odd sound of squirrel teeth on Styrofoam was what I’d heard.

Um.

“You’re not supposed to be eating those,” I called out to the squirrel. He dropped the cup.

Feeling proud of myself– I had communicated with a squirrel!– I went to pick the cup up. And the squirrel barreled down the tree, chattering at me angrily, and causing me, for the first time in my life, to consider how interested I was in starting shit with an overgrown rat.

My son, of course, was nearby, and terribly interested in the squirrel. The squirrel was screeching at me for getting too close to his coffee cup, and bystanders were starting to take an interest in the whole thing. I mean, this cup is gonna kill him if he swallows too much of it. I’m a person, squirrel! I’m smarter than you! You don’t want to eat this thing!

Holy crap, can squirrels do effective death glares.

Anyway, eventually, once the I’m-not-joking standoff ended, with the squirrel deciding there were too many people around and retreating a few feet back up the tree, I kicked the half-eaten cup (which appeared to have contained hot chocolate, which explained why he was eating it) away from him and picked it up.

Holy hell was that the wrong thing to do.

About thirty feet away from the squirrel’s tree is a life-size statue of a Galapagos tortoise that little kids are encouraged to climb on. My son, being three, wanted to climb on the tortoise, and my wife wanted to take his picture. I couldn’t find a trashcan nearby, so I just sort of stood near them, holding the cup.

The squirrel came down the tree, stood about twenty feet away from us, and just glared. The whole time. Seriously. He’d have killed me if he could.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never made a nonhuman animal that mad at me before.

…and I’m already like “Oh, God, just screw it, words are for people who can’t grunt properly.” It is very clearly Sunday. I have spent some time idly cleaning (which means that I move approximately two thousand small objects from where they are to where they should be, a process that ought to result in a more orderly-looking house but somehow never does) and reading a book that may well be beyond my intellectual capabilities at the moment. The tree in my front yard is clearly waiting for the first major snowfall of the year to drop the rest of its leaves. Oh, and I’ve been learning about how squirrels can climb down trees. Did you know that squirrels can rotate their back ankles 180 degrees? It’s kinda fascinating.

That’s been about it.

(Sidenote: it’s maybe 40 degrees outside. The neighbor boy, an eighth grader, is running around with no shirt on. Clearly, he’s out of his mind.)

I also sorta quit OtherJob, at least for the next several months. You can probably imagine that your average miniature golf course doesn’t get a whole lot of business during winter, and if you’ve been reading me for a while you’ll likely recall that I spend most of my time at OtherJob during the winter grading and writing. I have nothing to grade this year, and I make enough money that 6 hours of extra pay every two weeks isn’t going to make me or break me, so I spoke with my boss this morning and told him to consider me on call until spring when we ramp back up to seven days a week. I’ll still be in periodically (people are going to call in sick once in a while, for example) but I am effectively down to only one job for the first time in seven years until March or so, which is going to be a really weird feeling.

Wednesday I will be leaving for Nashville, where I’m attending an ed conference that will last until Saturday. I’ve been looking forward to this conference until this week; I’ve never been to Nashville and it’s all expenses paid, so that alone ought to be nice, but as the thing grows closer my innate homebodyness is taking over and I’m finding that I really don’t want to leave my family for four days. I’m spending an awful lot of someone else’s money for our team to go to this thing, though, so I probably ought to find a way to make the most of it.

Blargh.