My heart is still pounding

I just went out to the kitchen to refill my coffee mug and take a look at the balcony garden.  While looking at our plants I noticed that one of our local squirrels was digging around in a few of the pots.

I opened the door and stepped onto the balcony to scare the squirrel away.  While reaching for my water squirter (a tool that I use because the squirrels don't seem to respond to me shouting at them) I noticed that there were actually two squirrels on the balcony and that the second squirrel was behind me.  Just as I was getting an accurate sense of the lay of the land squirrel-wise the second squirrel ran under the open balcony door and into our apartment.  At the same time the squirrel I first saw made an unseen departure from the balcony (but by this point I didn't really care where it went or what it was doing as long as it didn't involve the inside of our apartment).

The squirrel then ran around the kitchen at speeds that were unnecessarily fast.  Of course, in addition to running around it was also insistent on taking a convoluted path that seemed to involve jumping on just about everything around.

Almost before I knew what was happening it ran from the kitchen to the living room and continued jumping on things (including Jeannette's knitting box).  

At this point I was pretty worried.  Because I was standing between the animal and the door I was fearful that the squirrel would make its way further into the apartment and maybe even try to stake out a hiding place rather than run through me towards the exit.  And because I couldn't see how to get the squirrel between my body and the door I was worried that any step towards the living room might exacerbate the situation.

Fortunately once the squirrel entered the living room it cut left into the main part of the room and I was able to slip into the room and put the squirrel between my body and the door.  Of course, even though the squirrel was where I wanted it, it's not as though my body was an impenetrable shield that protected the rest of the apartment (all the squirrel needed to do to get past me was run around me).

Fortunately, I think the squirrel was less interested in being in our apartment than I was in having it there.  Once I was in position it ran out of the living room, through the kitchen, and right off the side of the balcony.

All of a sudden the squirrel was flying through the air, seemingly heading towards the pavement two storeys below.  Amazingly, despite the apparent lack of planning on the squirrel's part, the squirrel managed to leap off the balcony, make it all the way over our parked car, and land on a section of garage roof on the other side.  From there the animal, seeming uninjured, scurried away across the roof to safety.

Do you think it's too much to expect that this near death experience will be enough to scare the squirrels away from their now daily destructive visits to our balcony garden?  I really hope so because the visits are becoming more regular and more destructive.  At this point we're hardly harvesting anything because the squirrels keep destroying the fruits of our labour just as they start to ripen (and sometimes even before they start to ripen).