Sneak Attack

Soon your nuts will be MINE!

A reminder from this week’s Saturday Squirrels to always watch your back and be aware of your surroundings!  You never know who may be lurking in wait for you….

Have a great weekend everyone!

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Share Your World – Week 220

The forecast is partly cloudy with a chance of falling space stations.

March 23, 2001 was a day for the Chicken Little in all of us, at least if you lived near the International Date Line.  This was the day that Russia decided to remove the space station MIR from orbit by literally letting it crash to earth… hopefully in the Pacific Ocean.  The Soviet Union launched MIR in 1986, and it enjoyed a nice run as the first continuously habitable artificial satellite until the late 90’s when it became the outer space version of the Corvair.  While most of the space station did end up burning up in the atmosphere, it still put nations from Japan to New Zealand on high alert during the de-orbiting process as well as any craft afloat in the western Pacific.  With all the hoopla over MIR’s fall to earth, Taco Bell got in on the act by placing a 40 by 40 foot target off the coast of Australia, offering a free taco to every person in the US if any debris from MIR hit it…

Does that offer include a free taco for every squirrel in the US too?

And now, assuming The nest doesn’t get taken out by a falling chuck of outer space blue ice, it’s time for us to answer this week’s Share Your World questions from Di!

We think it will fall anywhere in this range….

Do you use an ‘air freshener’ in your home/car/office?

No, no, no, NO!!!!  I’ve never liked artificial scents.  I grew up with four sisters, and have spent much of my Mecca career in areas where these scents are prevalent, especially when I stocked the household chemicals aisle which had all kinds of scented cleaners AND the Glade/Febreze crap.  My home is a scent free zone, unless you count the all natural cat smell…

And……. other natural scents.

How often do you clean the oven or microwave?

LOL!

In my defense, it’s hard to clean up possum guts…

Do you use a fabric conditioner in your laundry and/or fragranced tumble drier sheets?

I do use fabric softener, but it’s not enough to make my clothes too smelly.

snuggle bear's playing for the wrong team!

Much to Snuggle’s dismay, though, I’ve never used Snuggle®.

If you have the choice, do you prefer to get your laundry dry outside on a line or use a tumble drier?

I haven’t seen clothes drying on a line probably since I was a kid.  I was occasionally using my bathroom to dry clothes during the winter, because when the door is closed the furnace makes the conditions like a desert in there.  Yes, the shower rod makes a perfectly fine impromptu clothesline…

And in the summer, I can just have Ody dry them naturally…

Gratitude Retro Comic:

One of my personal favorites I’ve reposted often…. and to think it’s been ten years now!

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#25 – Get On The Bus

Squirrels can move so fast that we don’t really get the chance to note what they look like while in motion.  And believe me, because of their tendency to start and stop on a dime, it’s incredibly difficult to capture them moving with a regular camera… and that’s assuming they don’t just look like a motion blur.

So I was very pleased to catch this squirrel running along the park grass some eight years ago while in mid leap…. and what a very graceful leap it is!  Such symmetry and flow on the curves that outline its body, and the shadowed appearance against the sunlit grass makes it stand out even more!  If you were to draw an animal sprinting in mid stride as an art project, it would probably look a lot like this squirrel does in my photo!

You know, like the old Greyhound Bus logo….

This squirrel is a true work of art, and a very worthy entry at #25 in my Top 50 Saturday Squirrels of All Time countdown!

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The King Of Hearts

Oops! Wrong month…

Has the combination of the new week and the new season left you feeling more infernal than vernal?  Well, The Nest has just what you need to get that Spring back in your step!  It’s time to thaw out another forgotten classic that’s been in hibernation for far too long from that giant cave full of lost songs we like to call the Dusty Vinyl Archive!  DJ Scratchy may not have promised you a rose garden, but she will deliver on another retro blast from the past… while the Sponkies stay busy picking flowers out of Rainy’s garden.  The earworms are always in bloom on Mondays…

Of the many musicians to come out of the San Francisco music scene, one of the more prominent was a singer/songwriter who went by the name of Marty Balin.  After releasing a few singles that went nowhere, Balin got involved in the city’ folk music scene and eventually became a founding member of the band he’ll always be best remembered for, Jefferson Airplane.  Balin was only with the group for its first six years however, a tenure highlighted by his being knocked unconscious by a member of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang that was hired to be “security” at the Altamont Free Concert in 1969.

Pee Wee Herman got lucky not to run into those bikers…

After four years on his own, Balin came back to his old band in 1975, which had now regrouped and renamed as Jefferson Starship…  singing lead on a handful of their late 70’s hits like “Count on Me” and “Miracles.”  But Balin drifted away from the group again in 1978 and decided to give his solo career another try.  Nearly twenty years after releasing a pair of singles that went nowhere, Balin finally hit paydirt in 1981 with the schlocky ballad “Hearts.”

“Hearts” was a #8 hit, and though he followed it up with the minor hit “Atlanta Lady,” this song is pretty much all Balin is remembered for as a solo artist…. which isn’t saying much, because this song is waaaaaaay down on the prestigious list of 80’s one hit wonders.

I’m not sure I had ever seen the music videofor “Hearts”  before finding it on YouTube over the weekend, which is a surprise for me given how much MTV and especially VH1 Classic I watched back in the day… but it’s a dandy.  Poor Marty is moping alone in his studio version of Alcatraz, locked away from the woman who broke his heart.  The good news is that the lovers do reunite before the video ends, or maybe it was just a conjugal visit since it suddenly turns into a softcore porn movie.  Maybe it’s a good thing the upload is fuzzy in quality, otherwise I might have to rate this post NC-17…

I would never post anything here that you couldn’t freely share with the kiddies…

As for Balin, he steered clear of the more pop music oriented third act of the band he had founded, which by the mid 80’s became known as simply Starship.  That’s the Mick and Slick version of the group that gave us 80’s anthems like “We Built This City” and that awesome song from Mannequin

Nothing’s gonna stop us now!

You can count on me to deliver another lost hit next Monday!

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Vertigo

Look Ma! No paws!

Here’s an interesting photo that doesn’t look too jarring at first glance.  I mean, it almost looks like you can reach out and touch the squirrel.  But that’s just an illusion, as this is taking place a good 60 feet or so up in a tree, with your intrepid photographer standing almost directly below.  You wouldn’t catch me up there with a safety harness on, let alone standing on that branch reaching out over the edge at….. nothing.

In probably less than a second after this shot was taken, the squirrel made one of its signature leaps from one very high branch to another.  Seeing the squirrel not only maintain its balance, but keep its composure in the preparation for just another routine jump can be quite dizzying for us not-so-agile humans.  How is he not falling to a certain demise!?!?!?

Please do not attempt this stunt at home!  Our actor is a trained Saturday Squirrel professional…

Have a great weekend everyone!

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