Thanks to my sister, Meredith, I now have an acronym for the squirrely situation described in the last post... PSD, which stands for poor squirrel decisions. This leads me to several other useful acronyms..

UBD - unexplained bike ditching. Yesterday I drove my bike into a curb for absolutely no reason. I didn't get hurt, but I ended up dismounting quite ungracefully. I can't even blame it on a squirrel. A city worker was picking up yard debris nearby. To cover my embarrassment, I pretended to examine my bike very carefully as if it were a mechanical failure of some kind, but I knew full well there was nothing wrong. The worker was very kind and pretended not to notice at all. When I got back on my bike he called out a cheerful "hello" as I rolled by. I'm sure he was doing all he could not to break out into gales of laughter at this nutty professor type trying to look cool. Hey, but I had my helmet on.

MAD - mysterious apple disappearance. As my daughter and I strolled down the driveway for our after-dinner walk, she noticed that all of the apples were gone from our apple tree. Last week, they were all in their places, hanging from the boughs and just waiting to picked when they were ripe. For weeks I had been encouraging her to be patient so we could pick them when the time was right. I had images of perfectly baked apple pie. She had made plans to have her friends come over with baskets to have a picking party. We stood in stunned silence for a few moments, looking at the bare branches. Then she said something I thought was fairly deep for a 4-year old. "Those mean squirrels!" I hadn't thought of this. I had pictured some vile neighborhood kid sneaking up the driveway in the middle of the night with an apple basket and a flashlight. Or maybe the old lady next door whom we never see, but I've always suspected of being a fruit thief. I consulted with Meredith during the PSD conversation, and she confirmed Sara's explanation. She even went so far as to paint a verbal picture of the squirrels bowling apples during the long winter months when they have nothing better to do than sit around and tell stories about brave relatives lost to PSD's.

BDR - baking disaster recovery. I gave in to my daughter's wishes this evening, and agreed to bake sugar cookies. It was late, and I really didn't want to get out all the baking utensils and ingredients. I tried to convince her that tomorrow night would be better, but she wouldn't hear of it. She did agree that we could prepare the dough tonight, then stamp out the cookies and bake them tomorrow. So, I pulled down the Betty Crocker cookbook and turned to the sugar cookie recipe on page 432. We mixed the softened butter & sugar as specified. Then it came time to add the egg. One egg, said the recipe. Unfortunately, while I was gettting the eggs out of the refigerator, a butterfly on the other side of the world must have flapped its wings, which as we all know is perfectly capable of causing a hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean. Whether or not a hurricane in fact formed I don't know, but there was apparently the subtlest of breezes in our kitchen, which flipped the cookbook to page 434, so that when I turned around to double-check, I was now, unbeknownst, reading the recipe for chocolate nut brownies. Being only interested in the eggs, I read with amazement that we actually needed FOUR eggs. Now, I have become fairly dependent upon reading glasses in the past couple of years, and in my haste to satisfy Sara's whim I neglected to put them on, so it was not a complete surprise to me that I mis-read the number of eggs. I looked in the egg crate and their were FIVE eggs. What luck, I thought, that we have enough eggs for this recipe, and one left over in case Sara drops one on the floor while she is cracking them into the mixing bowl. Ha ha. After carefully mixing in the eggs, Sara was very pleased with herself, and I was congratulating her on a job well done. Then I looked back at the recipe for the next ingredient. One 16 ounce can of chocolate syrup. WHATTT??? Instant panic. 1 pkg chopped walnuts. Chocolate glaze. Oh, NO!, I yelped. Sara looked horrified. Tammy came running in, probably thinking one of us had received a severe cookie dough mixing injury, or worse, spilled everything on the floor. After my heart stopped pounding, I thought. Quickly. "Pull yourself together. Save the day. BE A DADDY! " OK - I had two choices (well, one choice - two alternatives). I could quadruple the recipe and make enough dough for 16 dozen sugar cookies. This would require 3 more sticks of butter, 8 cups of flour, all the sugar we had left... not looking good. Or, we could go ahead and make the brownies, although we would have to leave out the chocolate syrup and use some fancy arithmetic to add the correct amount of sugar. Well, this is what we ended up doing, and to make a long story short, it tastes wonderful. It's like angel food cake with a soul. After I put Sara to bed, I came out to the kitchen and noticed a large section gone. Tammy had enjoyed it, and that's all I need to say about that.

I've really been enjoying commuting to work on my bicycle. It takes half the time as driving, it's much cooler in the afternoons, and I'm finally getting some exercise. There are a few pitfalls, though. Have you ever swerved in your car to avoid an indecisive squirrel? It's more unnerving on a bike. I had one run out in front of me today, then run away chattering vehemently. I wish I could understand squirrel. I'm sure it said something like "That's right - you'd better be scared of me. I've run entire SUV's off the road. Don't you know I could turn your bike into a pretzel and give you a concussion?" Of course, I thought "yeah, but unlike a car, I can chase you down and turn you into a faux rabbit fur scarf." But I actually like squirrels. Many people think of them as pests, but I think it's fascinating to watch them move through the tree-tops. I've long thought that if I could build a robot squirrel, the world would beat a path to my door. Our neighbor shoots at them with an air pistol. When our dog was alive and healthy, our best fun was to let her out the back door in the morning and watch her chase three or four at a time up the trees. When she had them treed, she would dance and twirl on her hind legs , barking with great excitement. The squirrels would busily shuck pine cones and hurl them down at her while chattering vicious squirrel invectives. Ah, well, the good old days.