weather, squirrels and other delights.

Hasn't the weather and the colors and the breeze and the warm days and the cool nights and the long shadows and the orange pumpkins been a delightful change?  I like to sit on my steps in the warm sun and listen to the breeze in the trees and watch the leaves lift off their branches in a colorful ballet as they make their way to the ground.  I especially love when the wind gets itself stirred into a furious bluster making the leaves blow across the grass at breakneck speed heading for places unknown.  It's as if they are frantically searching for a place to hide now that the weather is turning cold.  The squirrels in my yard are so busy collecting and gathering the acorns and most of my bird seed.  Their boldness is making my dogs go crazy....

I was down in South Carolina recently and they have these strange squirrels there called fox squirrels.  They are so much larger than our squirrels here in the north and they have black faces with white noses and white tipped ears.  Some of them have black bodies.  I swear they look like lemurs.  Someone told me there used to be a monkey research facility near Hilton Head in South Carolina, and that a lot of the monkeys gained their freedom over time.  I wonder if those curious unfettered monkeys and some looking-for-a-date southern squirrels hooked up to create this very odd looking enormous fox squirrel.  I think that instead of hoarding acorns and bird seed in South Carolina, those squirrels could hoard coconuts ...