The guy who is "fixing" the ""house"" came by at eight this morning, unannounced, breaking a weeks-long AWOL spell on a job he was paid to do sometime in the summer of 2000. I'd been up until three working on an article, so of course, instead of finishing the hatchet job he's doing on the living room windows downstairs, he proceeded to bang the storm windows outside my room around in the process of taking them off.

As a result squirrels have taken up residence in the sash gutter of my bedroom window. Some people have flowers in their windowboxes; now I have squirrels. Squirrel or squirrels, could be a whole family, I don't know; all I know is they make a sh!tload of noise, and I am less tolerant of animal noise than I was as a kid.

I went to see what was up and found one curled up in the corner, nose under tail. I tapped on the window and turned on the light and screamed "You can't stay here!" He gave me the eye. Didn't move. I couldn't open the window, or he'd come in.