John: Colby and Daisy are very cute and quite photogenic. That squirrel and I only spent a few hours together. My memory is a little foggy, but I seem to recall that we rescued him from our cat. My mother would not let us bring him inside so we had to let him go. Unfortunately I seem to recall that our cat finished him off the next day. Such is the dance of life between predator and prey.

I seem to remember that when I was younger seeing a rabbit in our yard was a rare thing. These days I see rabbits all over the place on a regular basis. I wonder if that is due to recent (over)development. A few years ago developers completely wiped out some woods (where my friends and I used to explore and build forts) in my neighborhood to build million dollar McMansions. Once their natural habitat was destroyed the rabbits had no where to live but in our yards with less cover from predators.

As a side note, I had a neighbor that kept an intact skunk as a pet. They never had an issue with spraying either.

Nicky: Happiness comes with the realization that most aspects of existence are beyond one’s control, and freedom from jealousy and want is the essence of enlightenment . Witness, for example, the relationship between myself and most of my major muscle groups; as soon as I accepted that they would simply do as they wished no matter how I puffed and strained for their submission, I became as content as an embryo – and buoyant as one too, with the clever installation in my bath of a tethering system I can use to adjust the attitude of my body accroding to the slightest twitchings of my mouth, eyelid, and leftmost “pinky” toe. (And if you’re wondering: I attend garden parties and the like in a portable, wheeled aquarium the ever-versatile Mathilde rigged up after scouting out the ruins of an ill-fated adventure in the still-nascent sport of “beluga roller derby” that opened and shut the same day a few weeks ago; the first [and, tragically, last] race resulted in a spectacularly explosive collision that left much of the upper crust of my little town wet, blubbering, and covered in blubber, as well as less than satisfied as to which great white porpoise “won,” since the bodies in their current state had become intermixed to the point of inextricability. With a little welding and clever stitchery, though, my Mathilde was able to salvage from tragedy a lovely conveyance for me, as well as a pleasingly slippery little shrug to slip on during the chilly evenings I have a haibt of spending on the porch, bobbing gently and looking up at the moon. That’s my Mathilde, a regular Rumpelstiltskin of rumpled, spilt skin, as it were.)