bearing blog

A sense of distance.

Ford was very kind -- he gave the barman another five-pound note and told him to keep the change.  The barman looked at it and then looked at Ford.  He suddenly shivered:  he experienced a momentary sensation that he didn't understand because no one on Earth had ever experienced it before.  In moments of great stress, every life form tht exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal.  This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth.  On Earth it is never possible to be farther than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace, which really isn't very far, so such signals are too minute to be noticed.  Ford Prefect was at this moment under great stress, and he was born six hundred light-years away in the near vicinity of Betelgeuse. 

The barman reeled for a moment, hit by a shocking, incomprehensible sense of distance.  He didn't know what it meant, but he looked at Ford Prefect with a new sense of respect, almost awe.

------- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 

My husband travels frequently for business, I think I've mentioned.  I often say that the frequency is just about right; he is generally gone three or four days per month.  Certainly we would like to see more of him, and so I'm glad they aren't more often; on the other hand, since he travels so regularly, the children and I are quite used to it.  "Daddy's-out-of-town" has its own peculiar routine.

On those days, I (instead of Mark) herd everyone into the car and get them to swimming lessons on time; I (instead of Mark) drop the bigger boys off at Wednesday night catechism class and take the younger two to buy groceries before coming back to pick them up; I (instead of Mark) sweep the kitchen and wipe down the counters when the children have gone to bed; I (instead of Mark) make the morning coffee.   Because I do those things, I lose some of my planning time, some of my blogging time; but I've been doing it so long that it is just another kind of normal.  If there is a trip scheduled for the second week of the month, I have to do double school planning on the first week of the month, or else operate a bit more on the fly.  

Other stuff that Mark usually does, I simply don't do.  It's Mark who goes in with the children at bedtime and sits with them, together saying their evening prayer; when he leaves, he reminds them to say their prayers in the evening, and we leave it to them.   Maybe I'm lazy?  Maybe I'm too busy cleaning the kitchen? In any case, bedtime prayers is Mark's "turf," and I don't have any desire to try to substitute for him, at least when he will be back in just a few days.

This kind of normal is not entirely routine, not entirely the same as usual.  If Mark is gone for more than three nights, we will probably have a pizza-and-movie evening, and sometimes we accept an invitation to stay for dinner at a friend's house.  I make dinners the children all like, because the children's appreciation is all I will get:  chili, chicken soup, tacos, spaghetti and meatballs, Caesar salad (yeah, for some reason they all love it, and so do I, so it works out).  

I admit to sometimes serving the kids their dinner and then sending them up to watch movies while I eat in front of the computer screen or engrossed in a book.  After I have been surrounded by people for enough hours, I am desperate for quiet and solitude.  I usually work some such time into the middle of my school day anyway (we call it "break time" and it happens right after lunch), and when Mark is gone I crave it in the evening too.  I don't always indulge myself that way, but I do sometimes.

The last time Mark was gone on a weekend, which is much rarer, I hired a babysitter for a few hours between lunch and dinner on Sunday, just so I could disappear and decompress.  That money was well spent.  

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The quote at the beginning, though -- the sense of distance?  

When I say the travel is routine, I really mean it.  We know by heart the schedules of the planes that trundle back and forth between Minneapolis and the two or three Midwestern cities he travels to most.  (He says he barely notices takeoffs and landings anymore, and the one time we went with him, rolling it into a family trip, I was startled to hear multiple hotel workers calling him by name).  

But this week he's in Italy!

It's a slightly longer trip than usual, but that's not the only reason it feels sort of strange.  There is something surreal about waking up in the morning, knowing that overnight one's husband has been whisked 4700 miles away.   I can't quite believe it in my bones; perhaps it is just not part of my evolutionary heritage to really believe that the flesh of my flesh can have been separated, teased apart, and taken so far off in such a short time.  Perhaps if he had been plodding off to New York on horseback, and there haggled prices for a berth in a merchant's sailing ship, I'd get used to the idea in the time it would have taken to happen.

We talk a couple of times a day, and the voice-Skype connection is only slightly garbled compared to a cell phone connection to Ohio or Tennessee or Indiana, and I'm still talking on my same old phone.  Nevertheless there are hours of difference between my clock and his, and there's something uniquely disconnecting about the calls -- I just woke up and you're already done with lunch?  It's midafternoon and you can't talk long because you're exhausted and it's dark and you had a lot of good wine at dinner and you want to go to bed?  

And then there's a third disconnect, along the lines of "you had the local Raboso and the veal cheeks for dinner, and we had nachos." I cannot deny there's some power that one.

But the aspect that sends me reeling the most really is the simple distance:  it's not heartbreaking, nor sad, nor frightening, just simply strange and foreign that this person who is part of me can possibly have gotten so far away, even for a few days.     I feel I ought to be there (and not just for the veal cheeks).  One of these days it may work out that I can come along, and perhaps that may make a difference.

Perhaps the "few days" is the part that is so strange, that a distance so wide can be folded up so small that it almost -- almost -- fits into the spaces of our usual routines.

 

Quiet reconstructions.

(This post was updated  at 5:10 pm to add links to the artwork mentioned)

 

Mark is off on his annual ski trip, leaving the children and me home for a rare weekend without him. We are quite used to being on our own on weekdays and weekday nights, because his job takes him out of town frequently, but weekend trips are unusual. We shook it up a little: I took the kids to Saturday evening Mass, so that there would not be a morning rush, and (here is a first for me) hired a babysitter for Sunday afternoon so I could slip out and get a little breathing space.

With no one to tell me to turn off the light, and no place to go early in the morning, I stayed up late Saturday reading. Long after the two-year-old had nursed to sleep, his jaws going slack and releasing me, I glanced at the clock and put my book aside, and then slid carefully out of bed, thirsty. The light from the bedroom cast my shadow on the stairwell wall as I descended to the kitchen in my pajamas and bare feet.

I had left a dim light on -- I always do when Mark is gone -- so I could see for the trip to the faucet with my glass. After I drank a long draught and set the empty glass on the counter, I paused to look around me. I had swept the kitchen thoroughly and wiped the counters before herding the children up to bed, and though the floor was probably not very clean, in the dim light no smudges were visible and the dark wood gleamed softly. The books were put away and the area rug was swept. The dishwasher hummed and swished. My rocking chair by the bookshelf looked suddenly inviting, and instead of climbing back up the stairs I went over and sat down, drawing my legs up under myself in the perch to which I, whose feet rarely extend to the floor from an easy chair, am accustomed.

Everyone else was asleep or absent. I looked around me and felt a sudden welling-up of pleasure in the ownership of my home. It is funny, of course I own this home with Mark -- we literally "made" this home together, designed it for our family. I rarely think of the "mine-ness" of it. Being home in it is so ordinary, and it is usually the source of so many things I must get and do and fix and clean and prepare -- I do not often stop and center myself in it. And yet, here it is, always all around me, sheltering us all together.

I kind of like it empty and clean-looking. I don't get to see it that way very often. That pleasure would not be so potent if I did not get to enjoy it noisy, full, and messy almost every day, I suppose.

I am not home now. I am at a local modern art museum (the Walker, for those who know Minneapolis). The kids are home with the babysitter. I will have to get up and go back in just a few minutes.

One of the exhibits that is here right now is called "Lifelike." It is a collection of pieces that look like ordinary objects, or really are ordinary objects. Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes are there, and Chuck Close's "Big Self-Portrait", as well as some photorealist paintings, and a charming painted wooden sculpture called "Weeds" of lifelike little plants that appear to be growing from the crack between wall and floor. There was a short film which at first glance appeared to be images of New York City street scenes, dumpsters and signage and the like, but on closer examination had been shot on a working sound stage that is used for city street scenes in movies. Things like that: either the truly ordinary brought into close focus, or illusions of ordinariness. One of the installations that attracted me most was "Bremen Towne," a room that had been carefully assembled to be an exact replica of the kitchen of the artist's midcentury childhood home. That artist, Keith Edmier, had obtained the correct model of refrigerator, vintage cabinetry, and so on. Where he could not obtain the right type of item, he had manufactured them: the linoleum tiles had been laser-etched using a single original tile as a pattern, and the dinette set had been sculpted.

I could not help but feel a certain link between the gleaming vintage kitchen and dinette, nostalgia for the past executed in Formica and harvest-gold Amana finish, and my feeling of nostalgia-for-the-present-moment of being in my own quiet kitchen late at night. The artist had created a clean, perfect kitchen after his own memories, and it was pleasant to stand in the cheery, midcentury (so retro!) space. His memories, though, must contain more noise and mess than this, just as my life usually does. At the same time, there is something real and really peaceful, not artificial, about the quiet of my late-night kitchen. The children are real, and really sleeping upstairs. Maybe it is just a little message to myself that I need to take the time to enjoy the space I live in on my own terms, a little more often than I do.

Into the trenches, er, pews.

Mark doesn't feel well this morning so it's off to Mass for me and the three older kids.  (He'll keep the baby home, which will make things considerably easier for me.)

#1 will be serving at Mass, so I won't have to worry about him, of course.  Now, if I can just keep #2 and #3 from poking each other... and poking... and poking... and hissing "Stop poking me!..."  and poking...

Fortunately, it's Doughnut Day, so I do have a threat in my pocket.  Not my favorite way to roll, but if necessary, I can exercise the nuclear option...

Blink and you'll miss it.

Thinking ahead to next year, I borrowed some books about kids' container gardens from the library last week, since the children were envying the gardens of some of their friends.  

One of the books included projects for all four seasons, with some indoor activities for winter.  I briefly considered an "autumn" project that involved planting bulbs in a pot and then surrounding them with pansies that would "grow all fall" if you protected the pot from a few dips below freezing.

And then I considered:

• Today is our first day of perfectly crisp, fall-type weather.  Fall may technically start on September 21 or thereabouts, but trust me, if you went outside yesterday and if you go outside today, you'll know that today is the first real day of autumn.
• The weather people tell me it is likely to freeze tonight.

I don't think it's worth setting up a pot of pansies to "grow all fall."  I do like autumn in Minnesota, I just wish it was measured in something longer than hours.

Bus.

I took my eleven-year-old son on a small adventure over the weekend:  bus travel.

It's not that riding around on the city bus is particularly exciting in and of itself.  Because there are four children, we don't do it much, except once in a while when the car is in the shop.  It is always a little bit of a treat for the kids ("Hurray!  We're going on the bus!") until the trip turns out to be much longer than it is in our car.  

Saturday, though, my son and I went so that he could practice riding the bus with an eye to someday going by himself.  

I've always thought that by the time my kids were fourteen or so, earlier even maybe, they ought to be comfortable using the city bus system to get around Minneapolis and St. Paul, completely independently.  It's all part of my "don't drive kids all over creation" plan:  at some point I want to say "Hey, kid, here's some money, go to the mall and buy some pants that fit you," and the sooner the better if you ask me.  Anyway, not too long ago I did the math and realized that if the kids are going to be using the bus system independently by fourteen, I need to get started on training.  

My first thought was to find some single, repeatable destination, like a weekly karate class or something, an easy bus trip from the house.  Something I could ride with an older kid a few times, and then send him to do by himself after that.  I considered, for example, a karate class a mile and a half away that had a bus stop right in front of it.  

When the karate instructor refused to quote me any prices unless I took my kids in for a "free demonstration class," (yeah right -- like I'm going to give my kids a taste of a fun activity before I know how much it costs?)  I abandoned that  idea and was looking for a new one when I realized that I could go about it very differently.  

It turns out that two of the north-south bus routes that pass near our house are "part of the high-frequency network," meaning that the buses come every ten to fifteen minutes all day long.  They're simple, straight routes along one major street.  They pass many interesting destinations.  The distance along the routes are easy to navigate because Minneapolis has numbered streets.   And it occurred to me that I could simply work, as a first skill, on riding up and down one or both of these two routes.

So Saturday we set out for the bus stop, a half-mile walk, with the intention of going to the downtown Target store to buy school supplies.  My son carried his backpack to lug the things home.  We waited a few minutes, boarded the bus (another bonus:  only one route stops there -- no getting on the wrong bus by accident), asked for transfers for the return trip, and trundled into downtown.  Once there, we had a drink in the Target snack shop while we spread the bus schedule out on the counter and practiced figuring out the time tables.  When I was satisfied that he could work out how long the trip home would be, when the bus would arrive at the nearest corner, and which buses he shouldn't take, we folded up the map and went shopping.

Outside the store we transferred our stuff into his backpack, and a couple things into my purse, and then we walked towards the center of downtown.  I was thinking I might show him the place in the middle where all the transfers happen.  But we got tired and thirsty and decided to ride back out, past our house, and get a snack.  We used our transfers to get on the return bus.

On the way out there was a minor altercation:  a woman was playing a radio, a second woman yelled at her to turn it off, a man yelled "Don't yell in my ear."  The second woman complained loudly about drivers who didn't enforce the rules.  We thought the trouble was over when she got off the bus in a huff at the next stop, but then the driver pulled over to the side of the road and sat there for ten minutes while people got increasingly nervous about missing their connections.  It transpired that the complaining woman had called the police, and that this required the driver to pull over until he was authorized to continue, which did not particularly enthrall our fellow riders.  (The consensus was that if she was going to call the police, she shouldn't have got off the bus and left the rest of us to deal with the consequences.)  Eventually the driver got going again.  

A learning experience.  We stayed on the bus, things calmed down around us, and we went on our way.

I got us off at a little strip mall with a coffee shop in it -- my son loves coffee shops -- and we went in and had chai while I checked my email and he read the neighborhood notice board.  Then we went back out, crossed the street, and waited for the return bus.   It was a few minutes late so we had to wait a whole fifteen minutes (another learning experience) and by that time our transfers had expired (thanks a lot, cop-calling bus lady) so we had to pay another fare (learning experience).   

This time I sent my son in front to pay his fare and ask for transfers and a schedule by himself.   He also had to figure out where to get off.  He pulled the cord all right at the right time but sat politely in his seat until the bus had stopped, and so by the time he got to the door there were already people coming in and we had to excuse ourselves to get past.  I explained as we headed down the street that, yes, ordinarily it is good to stay in your seat in a moving vehicle, but on the city bus they expect you to be right by the door and ready to get off before the bus stops moving.

A fun and purposeful outing for both of us.  He definitely needs a lot more practice, and the next time he needs the responsibility of reading the schedule and making all the decisions.  But sooner than I think he'll be ready to ride.

Slow posting.

This is just a placeholder post while I finish my coffee before running upstairs to haul children out of bed.

+ + +

It's sort of our first week of summer.  I say "sort of" because we actually have one school-week left, which we're doing next week.

+ + +

It's the time of year where as you drive around town you see big lawn signs out front of all the Protestant churches announcing "Kids Adventure Camp!" or "Jump Into Summer Fun Week!"  When I was little, I am pretty sure they called it Vacation Bible School.  I think they still call it that ("vee bee ess") out loud, but it does not appear on the lawn signs anymore.  

My kids are going to a VBS camp entitled "Immaculate Mary:  The Story of Saint Bernadette and Our Lady Of Lourdes!"

(I love our parish DRE.)

We don't have a lawn sign.  Maybe we should.  Except then the camp might fill up even faster than it already does.

+ + +

I'm volunteering in the nursery this year.  Margaret took a good picture of me with my coffee and the other nursery volunteers.  I don't photograph particularly well so I'll link to this one because I like it.   She's a good photographer, or at least she has a damn good camera.

+  + +

We are having a very dental week.   The seven-year-old needs a filling, the four-year-old has an abscess and needs an extraction, the sixteen-month-old is screaming teething on two sides all night long, and the ten-year-old -- about whom the dentist announced to us, "This kid is never going to have a cavity, count your blessings"   -- has an orthodontia consultation this afternoon.  Here's hoping the outlook is sunny there.

 

(UPDATE:  Braces are not in our imminent future but will remain an option farther down the road, and probably a minor option at that.  So.  Good.  But.  This poor teething baby is SO NOT HAPPY.  I think we'll be exercising the "quesadillas for dinner" option.)

+ + +

OK, coffee cup's empty.  I've got some good homeschooling posts in the queue, I think -- my internet-safety lesson for middle schoolers, and I'm almost done collating the information for my three-year literature-based American history curriculum, which I'm gonna put up free of charge.

But somewhere in there I plan to head out to the playground.

Have a great day!

Oblivious.

Ann Althouse comments on a NYT fluff piece about families, in the same room, disappearing into their own devices.  She begins by quoting the NYT article:

"While it may look like some domestic version of 'The Matrix' — families sharing a common space, but plugged into entirely separate planes of existence through technology — a scene like this has become an increasingly familiar evening ritual. As a result, the American living room in 2011 can often seem less like an oasis for shared activity, even if that just means watching television together, than an entangled intersection of data traffic — everyone huddled in a cyber-cocoon."

It's a NYT culture article.

Is there a problem here? If a family of 4 were sitting around together reading books, it would seem better than if they were all watching the same show on TV. And yet, with books, you wouldn't be able to IM stuff to each other.

With either books or computers, if you're with other people, you can easily read something out loud to the people in the room and start a conversation. My grandfather used to do that with the newspaper, and I've come to think of it as a kind of proto-blogging.

I'm actually on Ann's side with this one.   As long as everybody shuts the things off when it's time to sit down around the family dinner table, as long as people respond to each other, as long as there are other things you can do as a family -- I think there's something rather cozy about everyone being in the same room together and enjoying what they do.  It reminds me a lot of when we used to get the newspaper and pass around the sections over our morning coffee.

Last weekend, I came home from my Saturday morning outing and told Mark about something I'd seen while I was having breakfast alone in a neighborhood cafe.  "There were groups there, and young families with children, but also there were several couples sitting across from one another -- older couples, younger couples too -- each person using their own laptop."  He smiled knowingly as I went on, "They were all sitting there in the booth together, drinking their coffee and staring at their own screens.  And I thought --"  I sighed and delivered the punchline:  "It was so romantic."

I made him laugh, but I was serious!  

Not that it isn't romantic that he will take care of the children any Saturday morning I wish while I run errands and get a little quiet time inside my own head.   But sometimes when I am sitting by myself having coffee and eggs Benedict -- and by the way, I do really love sitting by myself in a restaurant, it's one of the great little pleasures of my life -- I wish there were some way to share my lovely solitude.  

And there's something about the casualness of it that I envy a little bit:  Those couples, maybe, get so much uninterrupted time together that they can afford to squander it just sitting together with their laptops.   It's not as if I'm going to hire a babysitter just so I can sit in a cafe across from my husband, snickering at blogs while he shops online for carabiners, taking each other's presence for granted. 

No, gosh darn it, if we get some time alone out together, we have to make the most of it!   Reservations at fancy restaurant, check!  Get all dressed up, check!  Conversation... must have conversation... ummm.... quick, don't waste it, come up with something! 

So, yes, a little envy there.  I banish it for now, and remind myself that chances are good there will be time to ignore each other when the children are grown.

Get your political hotdish right here.

So, did you wake up this morning with an unbearable urge to know the answer to the question, "If the Minnesota congressional delegation had a hotdish contest, what would Al Franken and Michele Bachmann bring?" 

If so, the Heavy Table blog has a recipe roundup for you.

Normally, I find Michele Bachmann cringe-worthy as far as Republicans go, but I'll give her quite a lot of credit for showing up to this harmless Franken-planned event.  (Hint to other Minnesota Republicans:  When Michele Bachmann shows you up in the bipartisanship department, especially for a publicity stunt, you might want to take a good long hard look at yourself.)

If anybody from outside Minnesota clicks through to the recipes and is horrified by them, you need to know that the inclusion of cream of mushroom soup is kind of a Minnesota inside joke.    And I will bet you dollars to donuts that if you actually made the winning recipe, you'd like it, whether you admitted it or not. 

I mean, deep down, who doesn't like tater tots?

OK, maybe really deep down.

And so this is Christmas.

I might have mentioned at some point how much I hate having my plans changed.

 Whenever that happens, until I finally manage to wrest myself into acceptance of my new schedule, I find myself playing a movie in my mind of the way things were supposed to go.

 

 So today I'm thinking about waking up with my family in the bustle of my in-laws' house in Ohio. I'm thinking about my daughter making cookies with Grandma and my sons plashing about after Grandpa in their boots. I'm thinking about my sister-in-law finally getting to know her newest nephew in person. I'm thinking about Mark meeting old friends for breakfast and me catching up on clothes-shopping with my best friend from high school at the after-Christmas sales. I'm thinking about the annual $15 round-robin gift exchange at Mark's family get-together, with -- what was it? ten, eleven?-- little cousins running around, so that the Christmas tree will have to be braced with wires running into eye-hooks in the wall. I'm thinking about my own grandma's cookies and pie, and my smaller (but just as loud) extended family gathered together. I'm thinking about looking forward to the long drive back on New Year's Day, the kids in the back seat and fourteen hours of sitting next to my husband musing about all the blessings we have and had and will have.

What I'm doing, though, is making chicken soup in my own kitchen.

Monday night Leo started throwing up. And then it was Oscar, and then Milo, and then me, and now Mark is down for the count. MJ was sick last night too, although she seems pretty lively this morning.

Today I felt well enough to dig out the car and go to the grocery store, and I tried to pick up things enough to make cookies and things. It feels pretty thin though. There's no tree yet (I suppose there's still time for that - but Mark is too ill to help, and I'm not sure I can put up the artificial tree myself with a baby crawling around). Almost all our presents are in Ohio (save one biggish one for the kids that I'm hoping will be exciting enough to suffice).

I could say "Oh well, it's the non-materialistic, meditative Christ-centered Christmas I've always wanted," but I'm not even sure that any of us are going to go to Mass -- some special kinds of Christmas cheer, you don't want to spread around, if you know what I mean, and even if we all feel better tomorrow we might still be contagious.

There is some cheer to be had; I sang "Gloria in excelsis deo" as I loaded the groceries into the trunk of the car, and arrived home to find happy children devouring chocolate and fruit from a basket newly sent by Mark's mom and dad. Still, I'm a little melancholy and stuck in the Christmas that might have been.

So I'll tend my soup, and hope that it appeals to everyone by the time it's finished; and I'll clear off the counters and maybe make a batch or two of cookies. I think that everything will be different in the morning. It should, shouldn't it?

Merry Christmas to my little band of readers and friends.

Good enough for government work.

Minneapolis does not allow residents to contract private companies for garbage removal.  We must use the city garbage collection service.  

A couple of weeks ago, I called the city to ask for a new garbage cart.  Animals had chewed a hole through the heavy plastic of the lid and body of the cart, and squirrels were happily running in and out, strewing half-eaten objects around my yard.  The city told me to leave the cart in the alley for up to two weeks until the crew could get around to replace the lid and/or cart.

Yesterday I noticed the garbage crew truck parked behind my house fiddling with the cart.  "Oh goody," I thought, "here's my new garbage cart.  Now I can bring the cart back into the yard except on trash day."  When I pulled out of my garage in the evening I noticed, approvingly, that the cart was not the same cart that I had had before.  Hurray.  New cart.

This morning I took the  trash out and inspected the cart more closely.  In fact it was NOT a new cart.  

It was a different cart, certainly.  

But it was a different cart with a different hole chewed in its different lid.  

I cannot, of course, guarantee that the hole was chewed by a different squirrel.

So I called up the city to ask about it.  A very nice woman put me on hold for a while and then came back to tell me:  "Oh yes, the crews came out to fix the garbage cart.  But when they checked the serial number on your cart, they saw that the damaged cart behind your house was actually registered to your neighbor."

"So they switched the carts back."

"Yes, exactly."

I stepped outside to check.  Indeed, there was the familiar damaged cart behind my neighbor's house where, apparently, it belonged.  The unfamiliar damaged cart had, apparently, been behind my neighbor's house by mistake.  

So.  Let me get this straight:

(1) The garbage-cart fixing crew was sent out, with garbage-cart fixing supplies, presumably being paid by the hour, to fix or replace a damaged cart that is a known nuisance.  

(2) Upon arriving and investigating, they discovered that not only do *I* have a damaged cart registered to my residence, but my neighbor does.  Not one problem but two problem

(3) They had the resources "shovel-ready" to fix BOTH problems.  Resources had already been expended to put both garbage carts aright.

(4) Instead of fixing one or both problems, they gave me his problem and gave him my problem.

(5) Now we still each have a problem, but each of us has a different problem from before.  Not that it amounts to much difference.

It is very, very hard not to see this as some kind of extended metaphor for government services.

I pointed out to the nice lady on the phone that I still had a cart with a hole in it parked behind my house, and she agreed with me that this had to be fixed and said that sometime in the next two weeks a crew would come out to fix the garbage cart.

It was not until after I had hung up that it occurred to me that I should ask them to please also fix my neighbor's cart (the cart formerly assumed to have been mine).  Squirrels, after all, respect no property lines.