thai squirrel

after being sick (again), i wanted to not spend allll day inside, so i sat on the steps outside my little thai style house to read a book for awhile.  while i was sitting there, a squirrel appeared.  so, i have learned there are squirrels in thailand.  this squirrel crawled down the "trunk" of a "tree" that was more like a huuuuge green plant with huge green leaves, but because it's so huge, it has a really wide stem that i think qualifies as a trunk.  anyway, there were some dead parts on the trunk, maybe dead leaves, and the squirrel was very interested in this stuff.  he spent 5 minutes or more pulling and pushing at it until a rather large piece of it came off.  then he carried it in his mouth to a narrower branch where he proceeded to hang there by his hind legs and mess with the dead leaf stuff until it was more condensed, and kind of wrapped around his little face like a mask.  i guess that satisfied him (or her?) that he could carry it more easily, because then he walked across a big green leaf directly onto the roof of the little house next to mine.  after looking at me warily for a minute, he walked all the way across the roof of the house and paused at the end.  just as i was wondering what he was going to do next, he took a flying leap off the roof, his little legs were literally wobbling from side to side as his body flew over a space of nothing off the edge of the roof--but then he landed lithely on a narrow bouncy little branch of a regular tree and ran full speed up that branch into the tree and out of sight.  so, the life of a thai squirrel, who builds his/her nest (?) out of pieces of huge dead jungle-like leaves and risks life and limb getting back to the nest with a dead leaf mask around its face.

also, there was some bird or something scratching or pounding on the side of the roof of my house around 11:00 pm last night for what seemed like 30 minutes or more.  i prayed for that animal to get out of my life, and thankfully, it did.