Squirrel antics, package, postie note

Yesterday was a full day, every minute packed with seconds, as they say.

Nextdoor neighbor with broken fridge can't get repair done till the fan they ordered arrives, five days.

So I cleared space and he came over with some stuff he won't need before the repair. Left it outside. Looked as if he'd sprayed with sanitizer. So I brought it in with gloved hands, stored in the bottom, unused fridgedrawers, shut them. Washed gloves on hands, washed hands. The new normal.

Then he texted me for a shopping list since he was going anyway. He even scored toilet paper.  I washed the fruit in a bit of detergent, bowl of water.  Other stuff for freezer. I wonder if the virus survives freezing. That would be nice.

Later other neighbors from across the street came with fresh-baked banana bread, left outside, and an offer to shop. Other friends texted. Son texts every morning anyway, always has. And we message in the evening. So I'm pretty well supervised!

And my lovely letter carrier, wanting to save my walk to the postbox, left a package on the step, complete with personal note.

I will write about the contents of the pkg in https://beautifulmetaphor.blogspot.com in a bit.

Meanwhile a squirrel doing acrobatics to get the little thorns on the wild cherry tree, what's left of it. They only like the thorns, eat them all winter after the fruit's gone. Does any naturalist reading here, we have a few, know what's the attraction?  My researches have yielded nothing.

Pictures today not great for various reasons, but you blog with the pictures you've got!

Boud vs Squirrel update

As you see, the squirrels continue to get more than their fair share of the suet.

But they have been completely unable to steal the container, so birds are getting a look in. I'm calling this a draw.

That giant begonia I used as a hide to shoot from is the one I blogged about a while back, part of which I started from a single leaf stuck into potting soil then left alone. Now taller than I am.

Hard-won knowledge, human and squirreline

So I had to scan and print some documents, important stuff for the HOA, and there's tax season coming up where you can't get the forms from the IRS any more. You have to go online, download and print.

So Handsome Son and I got to work last night  scanning and printing.  The scanning went just fine. The printing hardly went at all.  All the hardware worked fine, all the little lights and beeps and machines talking to each other.  But the printing was so faint it wasn't there.  

Many workarounds later, involving two sets of cartridges and two printers, and adjustments to the software, and all the permutations thereof, and still no success, I said to HS I didn't want to waste any more of his time, I'd postpone the printing until I got my temper back and tempered my language somewhat.

Then it occurred to me that the printer and scanner setup is in a room that gets colder than the rest of the house.  And when I had my downstairs fireplace insert working to warm the place, the thermostat didn't come on for ages.  

The houseplants upstairs love this, they don't mind a bit of cool, but I wondered if the actual ink in the cartridges had gone thick and slow, like oil in a cold engine...hm.  Anyway, I brought them downstairs overnight, and tried again to print this morning, and it actually worked. Such a low tech solution to what we both assumed was a high tech problem.  Throwing our energies into the wrong place.

Where the squirrel comes in is that the other day, you'll recall I caught him knocking down and dragging away the suet holder and being foiled by the fence and the weight of the suet block.  I put another cake of suet out, separately, which he quickly found and tried to swipe.  Again too heavy for him to get under or over the fence.  So he abandoned it.

This morning crowds of birds at the big suet block he'd abandoned and forgotten, while the squirrel applied his whole strength to yanking around the almost empty holder, tossing it, stamping on it, throwing it around gnawing on it to open it, and seemingly unaware of the whole free block of the stuff three feet away there for the taking...

As I watched him this morning, probably cursing in squirrelese, I thought, yeah, I know you you feel!