An update on . . . nothing

I haven’t been posting much lately because my life is boring.

Wait, that’s not totally accurate.

I live with a malinois who has squirrel OCD, a geriatric tervuren who acts like he’s six months old and a farmer with cabin fever. All of that in the same house is not a recipe for a calm and orderly existence.

The squirrels are a fairly new addition. Believe it or not, we didn’t have squirrels at our place until late last summer. I don’t know why. We had trees. We had birds. We’ve had raccoons, skunks, possums, coyotes, pheasants, deer and groundhogs all within shooting distance (sometimes literally) of the house.

But no squirrels until now.

Our squirrels are on crack.

While I suspect this is the nature of squirrels in general, ours seem to be on the extreme end of the spectrum. They begin each day with an acrobatics routine outside the living room window at 7 a.m. Phoenix lays in wait for them every morning. When the little rodents start flinging themselves around the tree branches, he begins flinging himself around the living room. And yodeling. Somewhere, glass has to be shattering.

The first few times he did this brought me to the living room at a dead run, sure we were being invaded by the zombies from hell.

Nope.

Just a squirrel. Okay, in Phoenix’s defense there were three squirrels. And also in his defense he’s become desensitized to them to the extent that the glass-shattering yodeling only accompanies their initial appearance. Then he backs off to agitated whining and a bizarre little squeaking noise that I think is coming out of the tips of his ears.

He hasn’t caught one yet but it’s probably only a matter of time. The squirrels have not made the connection between the back door slamming and 55 pounds of carnivore hurtling their way. Or maybe they’re just not that bright. They seem to have routine “WTF?” moments before scrambling for the tree. I guess every day is a new experience if you are a squirrel.

Phoenix almost got one earlier this week. He’s got an incredible vertical leap. I was worried he was going to catch the squirrel. I was worried he was going to end up in the tree with the squirrels. I was worried I was going to have to call the Farmer and ask him to please bring the big ladder up from the machine shed so he could rescue HIS dog out of a tree.

In other departments, our weather is boring. Boring. B.O.R.I.N.G.

Not complaining. Just sayin’.

We’ve had virtually no snow this winter. It’s a nice respite after the last four years of record-setting snowfall but I keep waiting for the other shoe to fall. I hope Ma Nature doesn’t decide to start making up for lost time and try to cram four months of winter weather into March.

Jamie is fine. He carries around pieces of laundry and shoes at random, apparently just because he can.

Finally got our farm taxes done, which means I can find the top of the dining room table again. It needs dusting.

I’m actually staying home for part of this weekend. Home. Garage door closed. Not going anywhere. It will be a house cleaning, cookie baking, laundry washing, dog grooming sort of weekend.

See? Boring. Yawn.

All good things will come to an end soon enough. You oughta see the calendar for this spring.