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"A squirrel leaping from bough to bough, and making the wood but one wide tree for his pleasure, fills the eye not less than a lion, is beautiful, self-sufficing, and stands then and there for nature."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
According to the squirrels outside my window, fall has arrived. Every year, they get animated as they prepare for winter. The process involves a lot of chattering, scurrying up trees, and heaving tree parts onto the ground.
Until we moved into the middle of the forest, I always assumed that squirrels would carefully remove the pinecones or nuts from a tree, and store them.
Apparently, the squirrels here don't have that much finesse. They rip off entire pine boughs that are covered with cones and heave it all down to the ground. They seem to take the cones off later and run off with them. I suppose it's faster that way. (Assembly-line pinecone removal.)
Removing all these tree parts also ends up being loud because a lot of the branches the squirrels fling down the tree end up hitting one the metal roofs below. We have metal roofing on the house, garage, woodshed and a couple of log holders. So, you hear the ping, clang, thunk, clank as things bounce off a roof.
All this noise really stresses out the dogs, who think there's some terrible marauder throwing things in the forest. A lot of somewhat silly canine posturing and woofing at various trees ensues.
But the canines are wrong, it's just some really efficient squirrels.
And lest you think that I'm not going to tie this into computers at all, okay, here you go. Like our friendly neighborhood North Idaho squirrels, you may have certain tasks that you've been avoiding because they are a big pain.
So in this issue, we have articles on how to deal with some particularly painful computing activities more efficiently, such as indexing in Word, charting in Excel, and migrating your data to a new computer.
When you're done, you can reward yourself by visiting one of the delectable sites listed in the Rest Stop article. Unless you're a squirrel, chocolate is better than pine cones any day.
Enjoy...
Susan Daffron
Editor
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