So I was on a conference call with some dudes from Sun this morning. Like Eleven dudes from Sun. It was one of those calls that quickly spirals out of control and you end up talking about life-or-death issues (technically speaking, of course) and what you thought was something that involved you turns out to be much bigger, much grander, and much more dangerous…thus leaving you on a call where you don’t speak everybody else’s language.

And I mean that both figuratively and literally.

So I went out on my porch and took a few snapshots of stuff. Trees. Cars. The ground. Squirrels doing it.

I’m in Sacramento—home of everybody’s favorite Cimmerian—which (I bet you didn’t know this) is rivaled only by Paris as having the largest per-capita number of green, healthy, beautiful trees within the city limits. With all those trees, of course, comes just about all the rats, bats, spiders, squirrels, and crows you could ever possibly imagine.

After coming back inside and diving into hour 2 of what was to become a 4-hour sit-and-try-to-use-your-words-a-thon, I did a bit of internet research and learned the following neat tidbits about the lolcats’ distant, flea-toting, plague-having cousins:

Squirrels typically live in trees — in holes in the trunk, or in treetop crow’s nests. The homes in the treetops are called dreys and sometimes consist of two rooms and a nursery!

Squirrels are industrious.

Twice a year, in the spring and at the end of the summer, the female squirrel has two to five kittens.

Baby squirrels are called kittens.

Squirrels can live up to 10 or 12 years. After six years, they are considered old squirrels.

Squirrels are just as painful to have as pets as dogs. Mortality sucks.

The typical squirrel predators are, in addition to the red-tailed hawks, wildcats, foxes, owls, raccoons, and opossums.

It’s not easy being a squirrel.

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SO there you have it. Squirrels. Conference calls are awful.