Bad Habits

Bad Habits

They are hard to break, indeed.  So are bad squirrels.  Yes some may wonder why it took me so long to write a blog about my squirrels.  But yesterday I was uniquely enlightened.  For those of you who don't know me well enough (well you're not reading my blog anyway) I have hoards of naughty squirrels who sometimes come visit the house on a daily basis.  God forbid we are having dinner out on the patio, because all of a sudden it's free invitation for at least seven of them to invade the backyard.  Daily they'll come up to their drive-thru window, aka my kitchen window, and order their No. 1 with a large Coke, aka Give me your damn peanuts!  Now, we've tried other nutritious offerings, like Honey Nut Cherios, sunflower seeds, the occasional left over gettin' on the stale side white bread and hard corn bread.  But nothing is the steak and lobster to them like the peanut. Although I will say once they went pretty ape shit over tortilla chips dipped in some scary left-over who knows who licked their fingers or snorted in it taco dip from one of Eric's daily Bank of America lunch parties.  I figured if it didn't kill them then maybe I had 1-1001 shot it wasn't going to take me down.  And yes, I do use the squirrels as taste testers.  If I make a new cookie or cake, and not sure how it came out or what others may think, I throw some out the drive-thru window to see how it takes.  If it's gone within five minutes it's pretty safe to say it was FAN-FREAKIN-TASTIC!  Yet there's been others that even the blue jays and stray cat kind of sniff and are like, Nope, not quite that desperate yet.  Oh yes, and I forgot to mention how the squirrels like to help themselves to things or just assume everything is pretty much theirs.  A good example of this would be my flower garden, aka the Squirrels' Playground or The Play Pen.  There really is no sense in keeping flowers in this place at all.  They all either get eaten, stomped on or torn down anyway, aka my butchered rose bush that got split in half.  Obviously, squirrels really don't care about that stuff.  But they love the gnome house, the castle, the fairies and the florescent glowing solar butterfly they like to knock down and hide their peanut shells in.  Squirrels have also claimed part ownership to our windows, patio posts and bird feeder.  The patio posts because they like climbing them as they try to leap to the bird feeder.  And I have to give them credit for their diligence.  Our windows, especially the screens, because that's where at least one, I call Roxy (and yes I know what she looks like and can tell her apart from the others) likes to climb to see into the house.  She does this especially when she can smell me cooking, but has done so to scare the crap out of me as I've washed the dishes as well.  Roxy also likes to break Eric's balls by climbing on the screen of our new back (kitchen) door that leads to the patio.  He hates it when she does that, especially while she's interrupting his Sunday golf to do so.   Unfortunately, that has cautioned Eric to pack a water gun and Roxy isn't too pleased when she gets fired upon.  Yet, she refused to learn a lesson and keeps on climbing that screen until she achieves her ultimate life goal: get peanut!  Yes I've been scolded for giving the peanuts after they've been caught climbing the screens, especially the new door that they've put small snarls in with their long finger and toe nails.  If the squirrels are bad, they're automatically "my squirrels" and I really don't think that's fair.  In my mind, since my husband won't let me have a pet (that mean and horrible bastard), the squirrels are coming to visit me.  Of course it's not AT ALL about me, it's about the peanut.  And boy do they get pissed if there's something else unexpected on the menu that day.  Well going back to the tie in with bad habits and naughty squirrels, Eric just so discovers a travesty when opening the shed door to get the lawn mower yesterday.  For background information, Eric has found peanut shells and piles of leaves or remnants of nests in our shed even though the door is kept locked at all times.  Well to our astonishment and amazement, the squirrels have also now managed to bite the handles to my plastic Halloween pumpkins that I kept stored there and this is the killer: gnawed the gas cap to the lawn mower!  Now this is especially impressive because they managed to eat away almost half the cap, yet we haven't found any dead rodents or at least squirrels that looked like that Looney Tunes episode where George just couldn't take all the hugging and squeezing anymore.  So needless to say, Eric is pretty enraged.  After all, we just got the lawn mower last summer.  Can you just replace a gas cap and if so, what would keep the squirrels away from the new one?  So my man last night is stealing some old fencing from a neighbor and trying to booby trap that shed in a furious war of man against beast. I couldn't help but tell him how much he reminded me of Carl Spackler: "To kill, you must know your enemy and in this case, my enemy is a varmint." Meanwhile, I can't help but think of all the peanuts we feed them or things they could gnaw on, why some plastic handles and a Gas CAP of all things!  What would attract them to a gas cap?  It's not like it smells good.  Well all Eric can talk about is how he owns a gun and wants to start using it.  But I was like listen, it's just a bad habit.  They don't realize what they're doing or that what they are doing is bad.  Take me for instance, I bite my nails, bite the inside of my lip, forget and leave facial tissue in my pants pockets when I throw them in the washing machine, leaving little pieces of lint everywhere!  I have a ton of bad habits.  Climbing on screens and destroying gardens, bird feeders and lawn mowers is just a few bad habits squirrels may have.  So can we really blame the squirrel?  Have I gone to nail biting jail?  Unfortunately not.  So can we condemn the squirrel for habits it cannot control or has the knowledge or ability to change on its own?  Maybe the lesson here is squirrels are bad, but so are the humans.  So the next time you witness or fall victim to the destructive squirrel, think first before you grab that BB gun.  Remember, squirrels are people too.