There is a situation going on in the backyard right now (actually, it’s been going on for about a week). One of our trees is full of some sort of nut. It is a largish, smooth, green beast of nut that fall from the high branches and hit the roof and our deck with a loud thud. This is annoying, but can be dealt with. However, the nuts attract squirrels. The squirrels eat the nuts on the deck and make cute little piles of the leftovers. Those piles accumulate rather quickly. After about 4 days, the deck looks like this:

Annoying? Yes. A pain to clean? Absolutely. Dangerous? Let me tell you, the biggest problem of this whole late-summer nut exodus, is that the squirrels, high up in the trees, find it fun to throw the nuts on the non-squirrels below. Say someone is playing with their dog, they may have the unpleasant sensation of having a siver-dollar-sized nut hurled at the cranium from 50 feet. And let’s also say that you happen to be the dog in this scenario and you are, already, a bit skittish. Well, this nut-pelting just might make it so that you no longer will choose to go outside and need to be drug out by your master. This is not the natural order of the earth.

Here is the tree in question:

Unrelated backyard difficulties:

There is a raccoon or raccoons living under our deck. They enjoy getting into heated stand-offs with the dog and they do not seem to the be kinds of animals that will just run away — even if they’ve been pelted with, say, a nut, from a worried human standing on the deck. Developing…