Death in the early evening.

I got home last night to a quiet house. The animals are still being locked up in our bedroom/closet/bathroom area because of work being done in other rooms (more bookshelves mostly). So walking it there was not that usual frenzy of cats begging for dog, the dog wanting to go out and the general cacophony of being welcomed home.

I jumped upstairs to let everyone out, put some wet cat food on the counter, and poured myself a glass of cheap (but delicious!) red wine from Chile (Los Vascos Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon) and walked outside to get the mail.

That is a dramatic event with the dog. She LOVES getting the mail. It is one of our three routines (Policing the yard, Last Rounds, and Getting the Mail) that keeps her on her toes. She cries by the door and runs to the fence as I check to see if anything interesting has arrived.

As usual, nothing had. But many of our flowers are now in bloom (Bottle Brush, Roses, Oleander) so we walked to the back yard.

That is when it happened.

A squirrel had the misfortune to fall off the wall surrounding our back yard just as we passed by. Blaze, in her hyperactive state, leapt on it.

The poor squirrel. It tried and tried to get away. Let me just say that its end was swift and painless. (Well, I hope it was painless. It was certainly swift). I had to physically restrain Blaze from doing more to the poor lifeless little gray body as she was dancing through the rosemary. At least she caught the thing while I was nearby, so she didn’t have time to eat it or to roll in it.

After a proper burial, and a proper squirrel eulogy, I finally had time to finish the wine.

It is so sad to be a squirrel in the city.