It was two young squirrels embroiled in battle.

Maybe it’s all a matter of being in the right place at the right time, but I’ve never seen a single squirrel fall from a tree before, let alone two of them.

They didn’t even separate when they hit the ground. In fact, they looked just like a cartoon… rolling in a ball of dust; tails and legs and stars flying.

Damn. I never have a camera handy when the kewl stuff happens, but I sketched this reenactment of the actual events for you.

The fight continued for about 15 seconds.

Then they suddenly looked up, looked at each other, raised their paws to their cheeks and screamed “OMG DOGS!” in their squeaky little squirrel voices, and they raced back up the tree.

(Okay, so I made that last part up. Neither of them really resembled Macaulay Culkin that much.)

We also have a large Mulberry tree, and it’s just a matter of days before I can harvest the juicy red berries.

Hopefully there will be a few left by the time they fully ripen, because the birds are fond of them too, and the tree is literally alive with Cedar Waxwings, Cardinals and Orioles.

I don’t know what we were thinking when we planted that tree so close to the driveway. Both the birds and the fallen fruit make a huge mess of things.

I also don’t know what we were thinking when we left the back windows down in the car the other day, because we later discovered that we were the victims of a fly-by-shitting.

The evidence on the backseat suggested that a bird of above average size had flown through while performing aerial stunts.

I was amused. Mr. Kewlstuff… not so much.

Spring has finally returned to my little part of the world. The daffodils are blooming, the birds are singing by 5am and the highways are littered with roadkill. Temps neared 70° today, so, on a whim, we said screw the yard work and made our annual spring pilgrimage to our favorite burger joint. I swear, the place gets farther away every year; but, after passing 5 dead raccoons, 1 skunk and a possum, we were there. What the place lacks in atmosphere, it makes up for with the food. I’ve never had a better burger anywhere, and they make the best sweet potato fries I’ve ever tasted. I’m pretty sure I won’t have to eat again until Wednesday or Thursday.

Okay, I’m off to clean out the spam that’s accumulated the past couple of months. Gotta love those spammers; they always have something to say.

But that’s not the reason I popped in today…

About 9,000 of us from around the globe watched in real-time yesterday afternoon as a black bear in MN gave birth to a pair of cubs. If you missed this event you can’t blame me, because I told you about the dencam last year, just before Lily gave birth to a single female cub that was later named Hope.

There was so much drama between Hope and Lily over the course of the summer that it was sometimes difficult to watch. And I suspect, now that Hope is denning with Lily and her new half-siblings, the drama will continue.

This is an amazing opportunity to glimpse into a world most of us couldn’t have imagined, and it’s all made possible by the efforts of the dedicated researchers at the North American Bear Center.

Most of it is harmless stuff… he eats his steak well done, I eat mine rare; I’m an early bird, he’s a night owl; he’s a white bread kind of guy, I’m a whole-grain whole-wheat kind of gal.

But some of it is more of the two-worlds-collide variety. Like the fact that I lean more towards minimalism while he’s a bit of a pack rat.

I absolutely abhor clutter. It is damn near physically painful for me to be in a cluttered room. But, being a “collector” of sorts, clutter doesn’t faze him. So, to prevent us from eventually being featured in an episode of Hoarders, I’ve had to become fairly adept at dealing with it.

It started out innocently enough. He’d empty his pockets onto the top of his dresser at the end of the day. In an attempt to contain the mess, I put a basket on his dresser to hold the contents of his pockets. Problem was, he started each day anew, and what he’d left there the night before never made it back out. It eventually overflowed to the top of the dresser anyway, at which point I realized that all I had really done was added a basket to the clutter.

Obviously I was losing ground, so the only logical solution was to install a closet organizer, eliminating the need for dressers entirely. At one point, the only furniture in the room was the bed and the armoire. It was blissfully sparse, and I didn’t have to wake up to stray sheet-metal screws and zippo lighters anymore.

Predictably, once the dressers were eliminated, he began to empty his pockets onto other flat surfaces; the kitchen table, the coffee table, the bathroom vanity. To his credit, most of it was making it’s way back into his pockets. But he recently added a new twist… when he picks up his change, he leaves the pennies behind.

Here is where I’d like to point out that 1) there is a jar on a shelf on his side of the closet for spare change and 2) while I was making every effort to ignore them, these little piles of pennies kept multiplying until they were on nearly every flat surface in the house.

Since they weren’t going to magically disappear, and life’s too short to actually argue over pennies, I finally just gathered them all up myself.

And then spent 1/2 hour redistributing them.

He will soon begin finding those missing piles of pennies… in the toes of his shoes, his boots and every single freaking pair of his clean socks.

It should take the better part of six weeks for him to find them all because (and I just realized this) he has way too many socks. Apparently, he collects those too.

Anyone that has ever met me knows that I habitually roll my eyes. I’ve been doing it for so long that it’s become involuntary… like hiccups. There are a couple of people that know me well enough that they even know when I’m doing it over the phone. There’s the “you’re-full-of-shit” eye roll, the “what-a-dumbass” eye roll, the “is-this-conversation-ever-going-to-end” eye roll. You get the idea. And you’ll understand why I’m telling you this in just a minute.

The summer before last a bunch of us got together and had a picnic at a local beach. There were a lot of kids there, and one of them, who was maybe 5, was skipping rocks off the shore.

Now, my Dad has mad rock-skipping skills, but I didn’t inherit that particular gene, and he didn’t inherit the patience gene, so I never really learned how to do it.

But here was this little kid skipping rocks like it was nothing.

When he finally returned to the picnic table I asked him if he thought he could teach me. With the confidence that only a five year-old possess, he said “Of course I can!”

And he did. It took about 20 minutes, and he was not above slapping the rock from my hand when I was holding it wrong, but skipping rocks is something I can now cross off my bucket list.

Fast forward to yesterday. It was homecoming week, so we attended a football game at the local HS, and who shows up but my little rock-skipping buddy. He came over to say hi and gave me a big smile, revealing a gap where his front tooth used to be. So I jokingly asked “Hey, you didn’t lose that tooth in a freak rock-skipping accident did you?”

And the little shit rolled his eyes at me. More importantly, he properly used the “what-a-dumbass” eye roll.

I’m telling you, it brought a tear to my eye; mostly because I was laughing so hard, but partly because I think I may finally have found a worthy protege.