I Am Attacked By A Squirrel

....and other August encounters with Nature.

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This is the mighty Canadian Black Squirrel!  Gaze at its glory!!

But what ho?  This little rascal looks...sable. Distinctly sable. That's because the Mighty Canadian Black Squirrel has been sneaking down from Canada and playing Jody here in Washington State.  The result is a rather more attractive squirrel, frankly.

Here at the El Apartmento we have a particular sable squirrel that's been hand tamed by some moron and is now bold as hell.  It digs in my potted plants.  It climbs up on the barbecue and stares in at me through the patio door in an expectant manner.  It even whams its paws on the screen door, as if to say "Bitch, where's my PEANUTS??" 

Yesterday it freakin' attacked me.

Well fine, it just jumped on me. 

Actually it was chasing another squirrel, and I happened to be walking past, and in its headlong flight it used me to ramp off of, and I screamed so loud people stopped what they were doing and stared.

It just ran up into a tree and sat there looking at me.

I did not appreciate this.

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I was standing in line at the checkout chatting with a couple of people. One was an older man, and the other was a billowing elderly hippie lady. And it was casual. 

The older man was complaining about his feet, and I drifted away the instant he mentioned going to a wound care clinic, because ew. He continued on, and as I was loading my groceries onto the belt the hippie lady was commiserating with him.  Finally she pipes up with "Have you tried using honey?"

And I got this feeling. This 'Oh damn I know where this is headed' feeling. 

I'm loading food. I am organizing food. I am alphabetizing my groceries and arranging them by size, praying for that line to move ahead. PLEASE GOD.

And sure enough. Out pops the inevitable.  

"Or," she says, "If you don't want to use honey....do you have a dog?"

"OH FUCK NO," I exclaimed aloud.

I have been doing this in stores a lot lately. 

 Here's the thing. My grandmother was a nurse.  

And this was on the frontier, in the Wild West. She was pulling arrows out of people and sewing scalps back on!  She saw some shit. She also had to keep up with all the literature or else lose her license to practice, so she did that over the years until she retired.  She knew from Joseph Lister, is what I'm saying.

    All the neighborhood geriatrics would gather in her yard under the apple trees when the weather was nice, and eventually the old days would come up and people would swap stories about gory accidents, mysterious occurrences and old-time beliefs. Home remedies was a common topic, and I heard tales from those old folks that would gag a pig, although at the time I found this stuff endlessly fascinating. 

    The crazy things people used to believe! 

Things like putting hot tar on a stab wound (I always wondered who just had hot tar, you know, at hand like that.  And why so many people were getting stabbed.)  Or bundling people in wet wool blankets and forcing them to drink hot whiskey every time they ran a temperature.  The well-chewed quid was used on everything from bee stings and boils to eczema and skin cancers, and I remember my granddad chasing me around the yard with one when I ran a splinter into my hand. He of course thought this was jolly fun. I on the other hand was freaked the fuck out, this nasty grizzled old twist running at me with a big drippy quid pinched between his fingers, bellowing in Finnish. 

Inevitably these conversations would turn to letting the dog lick a sore.  It was Biblical, people claimed. Why, you ever seen a dog around a sore?  They're drawn to it!  They want to lick it!  They're trying to help! 

They're mans best friend!    

Nothing!!! got my Grandmother more up in arms than this one thing. Nothing. She would rant. She would lecture! And the funny thing was that it didn't make a difference. Those people would stand their ground ferociously.  I never understood it.  If you can't trust a woman who was hardy enough to nurse people through cholera, diptheria and the Spanish Influenza, you've got to have decided to be stupid and stay stupid somewhere along the line. 

This is how I knew that the honey remedy would inevitably lead to the dog thing.  And this is why the bare mention of same drug a heartfelt, audible OH FUCK NO up from my very youth, right there in the middle of WinCo.

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August here in Washington is the month for hornets. Around midmonth their population suddenly explodes and they come raging forth like Vandal hordes high on PCP. They chew up wood siding, tuck themselves in your laundry; I've had them land on me and then sting me for the hell of it, they've bitten bloody pieces out of the Biker, and built nests in our cars - inside, outside, hanging from the wheel well, in the door gaps, in the engine compartment - and these are daily drivers, mind! They are fat and shiny and absolutely insane, and do not give one single fuck.

Years back I devised a concoction fort use as a spray-on cleaner, and it really works too. It's a mixture of three tablespoons of Dawn dishwashing liquid and 1/4 cup isopropyl alcohol in a pint of plain water, put into a spray bottle and mixed. So fine. One day a hornet got to bothering me while I was doing chores, and I turned the spray on the little fucker.

DROPPED. DOWN. DEAD.

Holy shit.

You know how when you use a can of insecticide on hornets and it just pisses them off worse?  Not this stuff!  One squirt and they immediately stop and ponder their life choices. Give it a four-count and maybe another spray just for giggles, and they're dead. Yes I've counted. So remember that, folks. Three tablespoons of Dawn dishwashing liquid and 1/4 cup isopropyl alcohol in a pint of plain water, put into a spray bottle and mixed. Don't visit a hot outhouse without it!