Socks and Squirrels

Today I just have two questions that occurred to me while I was working this afternoon.


They concern, as the title of today's entry says,  Socks and Squirrels.






Socks

Why is it that while I walk around all day at work my socks get pushed further and further down my legs and into my shoes, so that I wind up with the tops of my socks down around my ankles and a whole bunch of extra sock material all loose inside my shoes? I pull them up from time to time during the day, sometimes even working some of the material back out of the sneaker, but I can’t seem to keep ahead of it. It’s a little like when I put my keys in my pocket and they are just fine, and then I pull them out and they’re in a hopeless tangle that I can’t seem to undo. Somehow my hip has managed to tie my keys into knots that I can’t figure out and, unlike my hip, I have hands!


This sock thing is really worrying to me because I walk so much. What happens if I walk too far? Will I somehow wind up with my socks coming off entirely, just stuffed all the way down into my shoes and not even on my feet at all?


Squirrels

What is it about squirrels that makes them completely unable to handle it when a car comes along while they’re crossing the street? I realize they are just little wild animals, but they do have a sense of self-preservation even if they lack any and all common sense. I know they know how to avoid danger. I’ve seen them. They get caught out in the open by a dog or something and it’s zing straight to the nearest tree. I mean straight. As a ruler. Like somehow they instinctively know that little rule we all learned in school, that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.


 They know this rule, that is, until they see a car coming down the road as they are crossing. When that happens, they go spastic.


They run left, then right, then left again. They double back on themselves so often and so sharply they actually step on their own tails, which further panics them. They run away from the car, then toward the car, then seem to realize that that is just stupid, and go back to right and left.


Now, all this is done while the car is slowly rolling toward them, the person behind the wheel making shooing gestures with at least one hand and calling out to the rampaging rodent in a strange falsetto.


“Run! Get out of the way, little squirrel! Go on! Shoo!”


Oh sure. It’s just me.


They get so confused that earlier today I swear to God I saw one of the little blighters stop in the middle of its frantic zig-zagging and actually flip a coin! How it managed to do this without thumbs remains a mystery to me, but I will say that he needed to work on his catching a bit. The coin hit the road and rolled away with the fuzzy-tailed little driving hazard following after it to see if it was going to come up heads or tails! Lucky for me it rolled toward the curb, and while the tree rat stared at the coin with its black button eyes, trying to figure out the difference between heads and tails, I rolled safely past.

You know, I wonder what would happen if we could get some little socks onto a squirrel just to see what would… no, no, that’s a question for another day.

Talk to you later!