An inquisitive old fart with a camera
I had to pick up some lumber the other day, and couldn’t help—again—be amazed at some of what’s on display. In this case, a 1″ x 20″ (yes, two-oh) 12-foot clear pine board. (Alas, I didn’t ask its cost.)
Flash back to Home Depot, over 20 years ago, searching for bargain 2x4s that weren’t totally bent and twisted and full of knots….
Yesterday saw an almost-heroic purge of 16 years of acquired workshop/play space flotsam—small coils of wire, plumbing fixtures I’ll never use, lookalike Argentine electrical fixtures that don’t play well with Uruguayan counterparts, hardware oddities carefully saved over the years because of course.
Between a weedeater and dog food, I was up to three freebie promotional beach umbrellas which, despite appearance, have never had any real use. And certainly not recently.
So I posted them as giveaways on our neighborhood Whatsapp group. Our neighbor Álvaro immediately claimed one, and someone else said her daughter would love to have one and she’d be here to pick it up in un ratito, which means “a little while” in English, which means maybe an hour and a half in Uruguay.
When she arrived, she was thrilled with the brand new umbrella (with the name of some dog food I’d never heard of—where does this stuff come from?), and held out as a thank you a cold 1.5 liter bottle of Coke Zero.
Which is close to the last thing I would think of actually drinking. I thanked her graciously, and immediately started wondering what am I going to do with this stuff? Then I remembered all the wonderful internet claims: clean dirty grout! Half a bottle later in the shower, uh, no. Speed up compost by adding sugar…uh, no. Clean oil stains in the garage! Uh…no. Clean rust off tools? Another day, perhaps *sigh*.
Just to be clear, that’s not a grooming brush and those aren’t nylon bristles.
Which is just fine: I bought for fleas.
A new trash container appears, sourced locally and looking more solid than the older ones from Europe somewhere.
That’s it to the left of the photo, and to be fair, trees falling during the recent windstorm probably did in the blue one, though I have seen some still standing that look almost that bad.
Two different species of ants trying to make sense of their paths as they run into each other. No hostility I think, but there does seem to be a bit of confusion. My moving the camera all over the place doesn’t help. But neat: something we haven’t seen before.
No idea why a sign maker would dump styrofoam boards in our locale, but fascinating to see – at least a little – how signs are made. As a lover of letter forms, I saved them “just because.” But I expect they’ll go back in the trash when the current collectors’ strike is over…this is the only container I saw yesterday that wasn’t overflowing.
A hand towel hanging on our refrigerator.
Looking through my collected campers over the years, you’ll find few that you’d be tempted to call classy, with many qualifying as the quite the opposite, from military monster trucks to…well, see for yourself.
So I was surprised by this one: 1) local (from Montevideo — the “S” plate), and 2) not parked at the beach.
We don’t travel to escape life, but so that life doesn’t escape (run away from) us.
I like that.
Just as our friends are getting ready to adopt a couple of 4-month-old puppies, one with a black spot surrounding one eye, I see this dog a few blocks from us and think, “poor dirty old dog”…
…and then it starts to run. Umm, no, not old. Betty, the orphaned sheepdog we took in last January, is almost 14 years old and not quite up to the young one’s capers – though she can indeed run very fast when she gets it in her mind to do so.