Damned, dirty apes… and squirrels

I had a rare opportunity to work from home today - meetings cancelled, lots of text editing to do, food in the fridge - so I grabbed a laptop and looked forward to a day without the TTC (which has been almost unusable in the past two weeks, but at least they don’t spit on their customers.)

Anyhow, I spent the morning hiding from the children, and in the afternoon when things warmed up I took the laptop into the backyard. I hadn’t been there 10 minutes before I hear a crash and a howl from next door - squirrels were digging up Stephen’s planters, and apparently he was dissuading them by throwing lawn chairs, or something.

Thing is, they weren’t dissuaded. Instead, three of them climbed up a tree limb above us and started hurling debris down on our heads. I retreated to my laptop, and they came screaming along the top of the fence between our houses. One of them actually fell off the fence, and landed in one of my planters (to Stephen’s delight.) Not wanting to fall behind the other two squirrels, this thing then ran right under my chair as a shortcut and rejoined the chase.

I guess he wasn’t fast enough, though - he lost sight of them and wandered off in disgust (yes, I’m learning to read squirrel body language.) Moments later, the other two emerged from hiding, ran to the aforementioned planter… and started humping.

This was not five feet from my chair, and they took no notice of my shouts of “I’m trying to work here!” and “Get a room. Or a tree.”

Somewhat of a distraction, but I’ve witnessed similar behaviour at CBC, so who’s to judge. At least I didn’t have to explain it to my kids.

Unlike last week.

My sister and I took the kidlets to the Toronto Zoo so my wife could bear down on her report cards, and the four of us ended up in the African pavilion, watching the lowland gorillas.

A crowd of children had gathered by one of the windows - one of the young gorillas had just sat down right by the window, in prime viewing location.

“Awwwww, cute!” said the kids.

And he was putting on a show, too - rolling around, and then actually standing on his head with his legs dangling in the air.

“Woweee!” said the kids.

And then, once everyone was watching his inverted form… he stuck his finger right up his ass.

“Ewwwwwww!” screamed the kids, as they ran away.

Be thankful there are no photos to accompany this post.

Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 06-07-2007 | 12:06 AM
Posted in: I hate nature