Acorns

There seems to be a good deal of concern over the lack of acorns on the East coast this year particularly in the DC area

I have two theories on potential causes. The first involves a little conservation of energy in the face of competition. The trees realize that there is no way they can compete with the nuts already on the ground (especially in the DC area) so why expend the energy and waste valuable resources producing more. Of course trees are not sentient beings, so that is just nonsense. With enough booze and the right person flying wingman, I could probably have fun with that theory in a bar though. I once convinced The Warden we had cable TV and phone service on the submarine.

The second theory involves a squirrel I saw on yesterdays ride. I think he ate them all. He was fat, he was damn near the size of a beaver. Scale wise, if you equated him to a 5’11” man, he would have been pushing 400 burritos. I saw him sitting on the curb on 4rth Avenue, coming back up from Waterman, hunched over eating squirrel Bon Bons or something, maybe a smaller squirrel perhaps. I guess I spooked him because he made a dash for the nearest tree, about 5 feet away from him. I should say a move for the tree, the only dashing this squirrel did involved salt and French fries. It made three leaps, then stopped and leaned over and put his little squirrel hands on his knees and sat there panting and wheezing for a minute. I kind of felt sad for the fat little rodent; I’ve been there before myself. I swear I could hear him trying to talk himself out of vomiting.

So anyway, he gets his wind back, and crouches low for the last flying leap to the tree. Or at least I think he was crouching, he more or less just kind of spread out like really thick pancake batter on a skillet, then gave a little chirp of a squirrel grunt and went for it. You could see the fat quivering under his skin like melting Jello, and then as he approached the apex of his leap you could tell he hit zero G, like Tang bubbles floating gravity free in the space station, his body kind of snapped into a perfect Euclidean sphere, a giant glob of furry saturated fat with only the occasional undulation rippling through, marring its perfection, well that and the bushy tail too, not too many Euclidean spheres floating around with a tail I suppose.

So he smacks the tree with a splat, about 6 inches above the ground, and just stays there. Maybe all the effort of moving that amount of mass all of 4 and a half feet just exhausted it, but I don’t think he had the upper body strength to pull himself up any higher, and even if he could, I don’t think there was a branch in that tree strong enough to hold him.

I hope he enjoys his winter, because I’m pretty sure come spring, he is going to have some skinny fast pushy asshole Joel version of a squirrel asking him how he got so fat.

I think I was 197 when I weighed in this morning, so I am still on track for a net loss over Thanksgiving week, just not the dramatic amount I was hoping to lose. I slacked a little more on the calories, but I made up for that with extra mileage. Altogether I got over 90 miles in over the weekend, 16 of those in an official winter storm this afternoon. Snow, wind and rain, good times on a bike, let me tell you.