Celebrity Disaster

Squirrel Crasher Photo, now verified as NOT being photoshopped

Celebrity is good, sometimes:

The story of the nutty squirrel goes back to May when Jackson and Melissa [Brandts], who love camping, took a trip to Canada’s Banff National Park. While hiking at Lake Minnewanka, Melissa spotted a perfect spot on the rocks for a nice vacation picture.

Melissa sat down while Jackson set up their camera on a small tripod on the rocks. As her husband fiddled with the camera, a curious — and bold — squirrel popped out of the rocks and started scampering all around, including over Melissa’s feet. She laughed about it and told her husband she hoped he was friendly.

Was he ever!

The camera had a self-timer as well as a remote shutter release, which Jackson held in his right hand. He settled himself on the rocks, snuggling next to his wife with his right arm around her shoulder and fired off a few pictures of just the two of them, smiling and posing.

“As we started taking the pictures, he ducked down into the rocks,” Melissa told Lauer and Curry. “And then he heard the shutter release and became interested; thought perhaps it was going to give him some food.”

I have been chased by squirrels, and pestered by them, but so far none have ruined my photos.

The reason why I was chased by squirrels is because I was forced to go around to the back of my home and haul my own garbage cans to the curb several weeks ago. Normally, this would be my son Byron's job, but he hurt his back playing with the mink from his mink farm on the trampoline in our backyard--relax, it has a net around it. The mink love to bounce. It's in their nature.

Byron is very savvy about these things. We purchased what they call a "Baby Bjorn" which, we think, is a Scandanavian product that allows beautiful parents to do things while their kid hangs off of them in the front.

Scandanavian parents do tend to be a little more self-centered than most other parents, as I understand it. My mother is Scandanavian, but the bad kind. She has always been very self-centered.

Anyway, Byron then puts a mink (sometimes two, because they're small and like each other) in the Baby Bjorn and they bounce on the trampoline. Once in a while, Byron does the thing where he bounces onto his rear end, causing himself to bounce up fairly violently, and this will discharge a mink from the Baby Bjorn. The mink that flew over the protective net landed just fine, but it was on a floatie in the pool and the animal panicked and punctured the floatie and sunk with it. Calm down, PETA, we were able to resuscitate it. No harm, no foul.

I was chased by the squirrels because they were feeding on discarded takeout and I interrupted them. They chased me and the rolling garbage cans for about a half of a block before I abandoned the trash in front of someone's driveway and kept running. Well, I'm 65. Slow jogging, then.

Not my finest hour. And, yes, the little buggers now taunt me when I go into the backyard. Good grief, when, oh when, can we finally get the heck out of Maryland?