Close your eyes and imagine...

a rat running across your front lawn.  And then another.  Would you not shiver, perhaps shriek, and hope that there weren't more?  Of course you would!

Then why in the name of all that's good, do you think squirrels are cute?  They are RATS.  Rats with fluffy tails and good PR, but still Satan's little disease-carrying minions.

Oh, and btw, they tried to kill me again today.  This time, it was a walnut left on the front sidewalk from the walnut tree that is in the very back of my very long yard.

So fine, keep on giving them peanuts and bird seed.  Just don't say I didn't warn you.

P.S. All the houseplants are either in the garage or in the house, sans walnuts.

*note to self* I love autumn

Sadly, it seems like I need to remind myself that I do love this season. From chilly, foggy mornings where my long back yard is an artwork in chiaroscuro to the slow burn of trees across the street to the smell of woodsmoke to the Halloween decorations starting to show up, I love fall.

That gets to be difficult to remember when I'm at work on a Saturday morning, doing something that two co-workers managed to tangle up between them to the point where it was an emergency. Fortunately, both Dogmama and Wilson were there, so we all got to vent a little, yak a little, joke a little.

My September calendar has seven book-building days listed on it, four down and three to go, October will be worse and November will be ugly. I'm hoping that the foot doc will let me go back to the pool, because deprived of that outlet, I'm eating more and still not getting rid of my frustrations. At least most of my colleagues have a sense of humor and can show it when they're not being pounded into the ground by the workload, and I get to share surreal e-mails with one guy at one of our other offices--my sanity savers.

Happy fall to my few remaining readers.