Haha,
My nickname has been with me a while, long before I started posting here. It's a total coincidence that Mike Phillips has an article about the difference between swirls and squirrels. That funny play on words wasn't my original intent, it just fits this particular forum really well.
I took that nickname after I had a really crazy incident with a woman in our old neighborhood. I was following this woman down one of our neighborhood streets (large enough to have traffic lines, but still residences on all sides, a 30mph speed limit). The whole time this woman was yakking away on her cell phone and swerving slowly back and forth in a distracted kind of manner, kind of like a drunk trying to keep it in the lines.
Anyway, I was probably closer than I should have been to her, and she locked up the brakes right there in the street, the wagon she was driving nose dived, and I reacted by swerving off to her left and passing her. In doing so, I demolished the squirrel that she had apparently stopped for. She followed me, honking and swerving and looked to be screaming in her car, which I thought was really weird.
Well, I didn't pay it much mind after that. Stopped at the corner gas station to gas up the truck for the week, and lo and behold this woman had followed me and proceeded to get out of her vehicle and confront me. She started screaming at me about killing the squirrel and how heartless I was, etc, etc.
I asked her if the squirrel's life was more valuable than her own child's, and explained to her that my actions were a direct result of her actions, and that had I not swerved over and passed her, she would have experienced a rear end collision at 30MPH. I mentioned that that could have been quite bad and that she had a car seat in the rear seat of the vehicle. I told her that instead of paying attention and driving like she should have been, rather than yakking on the phone and swerving all over the road, she could have gradually slowed down and probably the squirrel would have lived. I told her and in a way, she actually killed the squirrel by her actions, and that I had no problem killing a hundred squirrels rather than hurt another person, including her kids.
By the time I got done talking, the woman just kind of sulked back to her car and left.
The guy at the pump across from me just shook his head and smiled and said, "That woman really wouldn't have liked me. I don't even stop for squirrels when nobody else is around. Sometimes, I swerve toward them."
