Jacob the jerk squirrel update



In my last post I wrote about Jacob the squirrel who was responsible for shutting down Squarespace (my website host) after I called him a jerk very quietly. I spoke to Jacob after my last post and we worked things out. He agreed to stop eating my mikans and I agreed to never call him a jerk again. It was a great bargain.

But this morning I woke up and looked out my window and there he was, mikan gobbling. I still love Jacob, but I do feel betrayed. My heart hurts and also my toe, because I bumped my foot into a door earlier (not really Jacob's fault). I want to be the kind of man who shares his mikan with all nature of rodent, but if Jacob eats them all, then I will have none for the either rodents like Sharon and Judy, and also Toby the rodent, and the other Jacob.

I hope it's just a phase. a kind of リスの反抗期。

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Big Sur




I spent the first days of 2010 in a place called Big Sur. Big Sur is a coast and forest area between Los Angeles and San Francisco and it's full of happy animals. The first animals I met were a group of grey whales who, like me, were also passing through Big Sur. They were pretty far away, but I could see them blowing whale water high up into the air, and I saw a baby whale jump out of the water. I'm not sure what his name was because he was so far away.

While I was watching the whales, a man next to me said he had seen a California Condor . It's the largest and rarest bird in America and it only eats dead things. I mostly only eat dead things as well, so I think we would have a lot in common.I didn't get to see the condor though, because it had already gone into the trees. It probably had some work to do.

I also saw sea lions, otters, dolphins and homo sapiens.

In the south part of Big Sur is a surf beach called Sand Dollar. I paddled into the waves as the sun was setting. The waves were not so big, 3 or 4 feet, but they were very powerful. The current was pushing me toward a rocky area, so I caught a wave to try to get out of the rocks. I surfed the wave for a few seconds and then turned into it to let it break over my head. I do this a lot with the gentle waves in Los Angeles, and the wave always gives me a friendly pat on the back and head. When the Big Sur wave hit my back it felt like Ichiro Suzuki had whacked me with a baseball bat. I lost my breath for a second and my body felt all stiff.
I'm not sure what I did, but I must have made the ocean very angry for the wave to hit me so hard. I want to apologize to the Sand Dollar beach for whatever I did to make it so mad at me. Please forgive me.

Unsure animal has a problem.



What if you were a nice animal, but you woke up one day and had animal amnesia?

You might have hit your head hard on a tree the day before, or been partially eaten by some kind of bear or mountain cat. What if all of your animal instincts went away, and you forgot all about what kind of animal you were and how you were supposed to live?

This happened to my friend Jacob Tortoise. I saw him walking by, very slowly, and called his name but he didn't even look. I kept calling to him, but he just ignored me and went on walking, pretty slowly.

It must have been animal amnesia.

I'd dreamed about Jacob so many times before, I'm sure he would have recognized me.