MONDAY DIARY: ALMOST EXCRUSIATINGLY TRUE STORIES: ENOUGH TIME HAS PASSED THAT HE CAN KNOW ABOUT IT NOW.

About two weeks ago I was peacefully sleeping in the wee hours of the morning when . . .

After finishing a quick act of contrition and the heart attack having passed and determining that neither we nor the church had blown up it took only a few more seconds to figure out what had happened . . .

Squirrels.

For some reason the squirrels around here are rather found of transformers.  They must look like giant nuts or something.  Twice this summer already a squirrel has frickaseed himself on one of our electric poles.  This, children, shows the dangers of peer pressure.  "I dare you to stick your teeth on that telephone pole."  Listen to your parents!  Don't end up like this squirrel.

Five years ago when I first came to St. Sebastian it was pretty bad.  At least a couple of times a month there would be a loud explosion and then the power and phones would go out.  Then we had a new neighbor move into the area:

Frank is a red tail hawk.  Actually, there were a number of red tail hawks that moved into the area and the children in the school named them all Sebastian.  I don't know why I drew one named Frank but there you have it. 

 

 

Frank and the Sebastians were really quite good at their job of ridding the area of gullible squirrels that give in too easily to peer pressure and there have been almost no outages the past three or four summers.  In fact they were too good.  At the end of last summer there was nary a squirrel to be seen and so it seems that this summer Frank and the Sebastians have moved on.  Hence our latest outages and what seems like an explosion of squirrels around the property.

 

So I let Sebastian (the dog) out shortly after and he came back like this:

There was the squirrel, stiff as a board, a little singed, and looking like it had a very bad hair day.

This had no effect on his vice like grip on the barbecue critter.

He was not going to bring it into the house however.  We were going to stay outside until he buried the poor creature, which, thanks be, he did in an undisclosed location after carrying it around in his mouth for a good spell.

 

There was just this unfortunate incident however.