The Myth. The Legend. The Dead 70 Year Old Squirrel.

Let's say you live in Amarillo, Texas, and one day kismet happens to introduce itself to you - you might end up at the O'Brien/Moore cabin at the Palo Duro Club. And if you DO end up at the O'Brien/Moore cabin at the Palo Duro Club, I encourage you to seek out a very old, small, and what some may call creepy....member of the family. His name? Senor Cheeps. Yes, Senor. I can't do the accent thingy over the N, but you should pronounce it as if it were there.



Now, he's so allusive that I don't happen to have a picture on me. But guess what? There's a lot of taxidermied squirrels out there. Cheeps is especially interesting though, because he happens to be a surly plump fellow, who I would personally like to put at the end of the bed while you're sleeping.

I would just looove to see your face when you wake up and find a taxidermied squirrel staring back at you.



He just has that certain sheen in his totally fake plastic eye that makes you want to say "good show, old man." OOOH! Or maybe "clever girl" like the Australian gentleman in Jurassic Park who says that to a velociraptor right before it samples his face. Totally tragic, by the way. That guy was by FAR the best character in the film.

Yes, I'm going to torture you with random pictures of taxidermied squirrels that I find on the internet throughout this blog post.

There are many, many interesting things in that cabin, but no certain thing has quite piqued my interest like Senor Cheeps. As girls, my friends and I discovered this relic and decided to take pictures with/of it in various places. First, however, we had to come up with a name.



Alison and I were obsessed with a Monty Python computer game at the time, where it suggested that the Black Knight from their Holy Grail movie had a pet budgie, named Senor Cheeps. The name was so odd, that it became a regular tag-along subject in our conversations - and when an opportunity to name something presented itself, we could think of nothing else.



On days during the summer where we were too sun burned to actually be in the sun in any way, we would go to random places in Canyon, Texas, with Cheeps in hand to take pictures. The best thing in the world was trying to get people to hold him.

Because seriously, some rand-o comes up to you and asks you to hold a dead squirrel? What would you say? You'll be surprised to know - every single person said yes. Even a group of nuns.

Yep. We accosted - and successfully photographed - a group of nuns holding a dead squirrel. God, I've got to find those pictures. That'll be a follow up post of yet another thing lurking in my storage unit.

In closing, how creep-tastic is this?? That's right, they're earrings.



Somewhere in the thick of the bumblescumb lay country, some interesting specimen of humanity is really enjoying those....