Given my propensity for inflicting

bodily harm on computers ­ dropping a laptop on the kitchen tile,

spilling coffee into its keyboard ­ you've got to wonder why I'd

keep a fish bowl on my work table.

A saltwater tank, at that.

It's beautiful. The water stays

crystal clear with no effort on my part. Bright coral forms an environment

for fish swimming gracefully around and through it, while a ribbon of

bubbles gurgles merrily from the sandy bottom.

The amazing part is that I've

never cleaned the tank, and if I forget to feed its inhabitants, they

won't suffer for it.

Even the light changes, going

from daytime to evening, darkening dramatically, the fish mere silhouettes.

At night an artificial light throws a rippling pattern on the sand as

the light streams down through the water.

The aquarium, you might have

guessed, is "in" my computer's monitor, a screensaver offered

at SereneScreen.com and bundled with Windows XP by Microsoft? (See

it also on FeldonCentral.com/Sachs/thefish.html , a stunning Web

site on saltwater tropicals. Alive and real ­ and requiring expert

care ­ the darn things fetch as much as $55 apiece.)

There are only three virtual

fish in my computer, however: a wimplefish, a clown trigger and a powder

blue tang. I was wondering where one could buy more fish, some snails

and plants, perhaps, maybe a starfish or seahorses.

From Bill Gates' Fish Store,

no doubt. Knowing Microsoft, should I be surprised to come into my office

one morning and find a fish floating belly-up on the surface of my monitor?

Or ­ worse yet ­ flopping on my keyboard, dripping water into

its expensive innards?

The array of birdfeeders on

and beyond our deck does a great job attracting birds, but where birds

dine, so do squirrels. Although we thwart their most larcenous sorties

with pole baffles, we don't mind too much that they eat the cracked corn

we put down for ground feeders. It's 'way cheaper than sunflower seed

and helps dampen their appetite for Niger.

Over the past few years, however,

we have observed some truly odd things (hence the term "squirrelly")

happening about 20 feet from the deck. At the edge of the woods in which

we live, we placed a rickety old wooden bench we hated to throw away.

Birds sometimes land there,

and a chipmunk's tunnel opens under it. Clever, don't you think, for that

little fellow to have a roof over his front door?

"Look at that," Dave

exclaimed one morning at breakfast. A squirrel leaped up on the bench

and did a somersault in mid-leap, then scurried to the base of a small

tree, where he flipped over several times before dashing