The squirrel bounced straight up the air, its back arched like a Halloween cat.
A few seconds earlier, I’d bowled an apple core onto the patio for the squirrels to pick at. Some, but not all of them, like apples. The bouncy boy had seen the apple and started toward it.
He miscalculated, so the apple hit him in the nose.
Sorry, little squirrel!
I received an elegant floral arrangement from Winston’s on Friday. It wasn’t from Iggy.
Iggy showered me with presents — including a very romantic roll of bicycle handlebar cushioning tape — in addition to taking me out for dinner at Piattini on Newbury Street, and a concert by the Dave Brubeck Quartet.
I’m struggling with making progress on a new type of writing project. So I procrastinated by reading some blog posts, including "How to get and stay motivated."
The author suggests questions I can ask myself, including "5. If I had no fears in this situation, what would I do?"
I have two answers:
1) I would tell my clients that I’ve realized that I don’t enjoy their kind of project.
2) I would ask my clients to send me some good samples of written work in our format, so I can analyze it to figure out how I can model our joint project after those samples.
Sometimes I underestimate what I can do or I don’t give myself enough time to learn how to do it. On the other hand, just because I should be able to do X, doesn’t mean that I’ll enjoy it or that I have to do it.
I’ve got to mull this over.
This coming Wednesday I’m in charge of table topics for Toastmasters. I’ve got to propose topics on which members can deliver impromptu speeches of perhaps two minutes in length.
Now that it’s the season for spending time in our back yards, I’m making the back yard the focus of my table topics:
Marjorie Mourningdove was the name I gave the first of her kind to visit our bird feeders.
Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar inspired me. I didn’t know anything about that novel until I googled it and found a Slate article, "Marjorie Morningstar:The conservative novel that liberal feminists love."
Mourning doves tend to travel in pairs. I referred to them as the Marjories for a couple years. Eventually Iggy dubbed the husband "Marvin" because the name sounded good with Marjorie.
Today I saw three mourning doves loitering near our thistle feeder. I named the interloper Marnie after the troubled woman in Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same name.
My peony flowers looked like peaches — half-ripe, half-green — two days ago. Today they popped open. Today they popped open to resemble a frowsy dancer’s bra cups.
My oriental lilies zoomed up out of nowhere while I was in Paris. I should stake them along with my dahlias, recently planted with help from my cousin Godfrey, who’s visiting from Canada.
Riri the squirrel stands on her hind legs when I fail in my peanut dispensing duties. "What’s wrong with you?" she seems to say.
Riri expects me to dispense peanuts with the dependability of a vending machine. Except she doesn’t fork over any coins. The glimpse of the red-spotted rear paws that distinguish her from most of the other garden squirrels should be my reward.
She is the boldest of my squirrels, firmly wrapping her teeth around the nut I extend from between the tips of my fingers. Then, she scurries away to eat or bury each nut, then returns eagerly for another. There seems to be no limit to her appetite, I wonder if she would eat until she exploded.
Ready Freddie, who used to accept peanuts from my fingers, like Riri, regressed while I was in Paris. Now she quivers and backs off, instead of launching forward for my handout. Or maybe she’s figured out that I have a soft spot for her, so she can extract nuts from me without placing herself in dangerous proximity to my mammoth human body.