Chipmunk and column both disappear

Well, that didn’t work. I had a very nice column about a chipmunk and now it is floating around in cyberspace. Wherever it is, it is doing a good job of hiding as I have no idea where it is. 

 This applies to both the chipmunk and the column. They have vanished. Perhaps one day they will climb out of whatever black hole they have fallen into. The chipmunk will probably reappear first. I have faith that at some future time it will once again break into my house and eat all of Gracie’s cat food.

 Gracie was calmly taking her afternoon bath when my hubby called me into the kitchen. We both watched as the chipmunk draped itself over the bowl and was using its hands to shovel cat food into its mouth as fast as it could. It didn’t bother to look up to see if it there were any predators around.

We have since moved the cat’s bowl out of the kitchen and so far the chipmunk has disappeared. Gracie said she is retired and it is no longer her responsibility to keep free-loading chipmunks out of the house.

 Living close to the river, I expect a mouse or two to visit when the weather changes. This is the first time a chipmunk has taken advantage of our hospitality. For the record, a mouse trap won’t do any good against a chipmunk. It snapped a trap and licked off all the peanut butter without leaving so much as a hair behind.

The chipmunk saga has proven to be a welcome respite from the hustle and bustle that go along with the holiday season.

We did get a visit from the twins last week. They are my grandmother’s youngest brother’s kids. They are a year or two younger than me. They used to visit us on a regular basis when we were all little. They lived in St. Marys, Ohio so it was a bit of a drive for them. Now one lives in Celina and the other in Wapakoneta, Ohio.

 We reconnected awhile back when I was in the middle of a genealogy project. They look a lot like their Mom. When we were all young, we saw them often enough that  it wasn’t hard to tell the girls apart. When we saw them last week I had to look twice as they had both adopted the same hairstyle. I was glad they brought their husbands along as that made it easier to tell which one was which.

 I am still waiting on stuff I bought online for the kids. With a lot of luck their presents should arrive in time to be wrapped and sent. I do have default presents that I can pick up locally. My daughter said to get them Nerf bullets, any size would do. While I oppose real guns not used to bring in food for the winter, I played with enough cap guns as a child to realize that toy guns are a far cry from real ones.

There is still shopping to be done. There are presents to wrap and send. There are more decorations to be put up. There is still the yearly decision of whether or not to buy a tree. The Christmas rush is far from over. 

There are still Santa letters to write. This will be the last year for those as all my little ones aren’t so little any more. So far all the kids are healthy, including brain surgery recipient, Jacob. 

Sometimes I wonder why we go through all of this rushing here and there to buy presents that the recipient won’t like. We knock ourselves out baking stuff that one won’t eat because it has gluten in it, another is lactose intolerant, and yet another doesn’t want any because they are on some kind of diet. 

 Then I hear a carol on the radio. I remember my loved ones faces as they exclaim, “I’m glad you came.” I remember that Charlie Brown Christmas show when Linus reads the Christmas story and says, “That’s what Christmas is about, Charlie Brown.” One more week and it will all be over for the year. In the meantime, if you find a chipmunk in your kitchen, it likes cat food.