Sixteen years of human-squirrel diplomacy ... gone in an instant.

[Rain Man]

I was in the kitchen today, and saw a squirrel out in our plum tree.

For some reason the squirrels like to gnaw on the plum tree's bark, and my wife asked if the squirrel was gnawing. I wasn't sure, but I was eating crackers and decided to throw one out there so the squirrel would have something else to gnaw.

So I open the door and wing out a cracker. Now, the plum tree is about 25 feet from our back door, so you really have to put some arm into a cracker to have any hope of it making a distance near the tree. I was aided by the fact that it was one of those denser round crackers as opposed to a saltine or club cracker, so I went sidearm and winged it like frisbee.

This thing catches the wind, arcs out and then peels back toward the tree. The plum tree is one of those trees that has a lot of dense branches and twigs and stuff, and this thing stays airborne, zips through the branches ... and nails the squirrel right in the shoulder blade. He never knew what hit him.

What are the odds of that? I try to be a good squirrel neighbor, and then I go and nail one with a cracker from 25 feet away. No one's ever going to believe it was an accident, and now I'm going to be having nuts dropped on me every time I go outside.