Poem for Saturday, Pesky Squirrels, 'Masks'

An Appointment
By W.B. Yeats

Being out of heart with government
I took a broken root to fling
Where the proud, wayward squirrel went,
Taking delight that he could spring;
And he, with that low whinnying sound
That is like laughter, sprang again
And so to the other tree at a bound.
Nor the tame will, nor timid brain,
Bred that fierce tooth and cleanly limb
And threw him up to laugh on the bough;
No government appointed him.

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My day started with procrastination, which was not my fault -- I had a cat using my left arm for a pillow and a cat using my right thigh for a pillow, which should make it obvious that I could not get out of bed in any hurry -- and continued in that vein until evening. I had to finish a review of Star Trek: The Next Generation's fairly bad episode "Masks", during the course of which I spent much time chasing cats off heating vents, decorating my Superpoke penguin's Bonfire Night habitat, looking up camera stuff for Adam, conversing with a friend on Google chat, eating peanut butter and Nutella, and watching the excitement out the window:


The squirrels in our neighborhood are busy plumping up for the winter.


We have a pair who have been "cleaning up" under the bird feeder because they've gotten too big to try to jump right on the feeder itself.


You can see the tail of the second at right under the collapsible chair...


...though the bigger squirrel has a habit of pesking the smaller one off the deck.


Here they are in the middle of a leap attack!


Meanwhile the birds sit and watch from the side of the old plastic kiddie pool...


...the side of the deck, the side of the house, hanging upside down from the wind chimes, waiting to get to the bird feeder.


I have no chipmunk photo tonight, but I do have evidence of chipmunk activity on our front porch in the past couple of days.

I'm sure I did other things today but I am pleasantly full from dinner with my parents -- meatball-and-bean stew that my mother thought I'd want as an appetizer, that was so filling that I couldn't even finish the bowl -- and now I'm distracted by the UCF/Houston game after tonight's Smallville and Sanctuary. It's rare for me to much prefer the latter to the former, and it wasn't even a great episode -- Tesla-in-trouble storyline was predictable, though I liked the Bigfoot origins story -- but sniveLois just infuriates me, she never bent over that far for her father before, I find it impossible to believe that it would take her that long to stand up for Clark if not for herself. I'm just glad that Flagg is a tea partyer and it looks like Teri Hatcher is going to be Lois's mom.

Fannish5: Name five historical characters whose lives you'd like to see adapted into movies or TV series.
1. Matilda of Tuscany
2. Christine de Pisan
3. Anne of Denmark
4. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley
5. Margaret Caroline Anderson