Inspiration: The Odd Thing

I've written a couple of blog posts (here  and here) recently about how setting inspires my writing.  However, inspiration can come from many places.  Sometimes I'm inspired by seeing something odd.  For example, I have an avocado tree in my backyard.  I also have a lot of squirrels, and they love to take the avocados and hide them, sometimes in places only a squirrel would think were clever.  I have a vase of artificial flowers on my front porch, and one day I saw this:

I started to imagine a character who wanted to tell the squirrel that this was a bad hiding place.  Soon I had a flash fiction about that person.  The story was recently accepted for publication; I'll post when it comes out so you can see what noticing an odd thing turned into.