Author: doug

Classy!

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.

Poor old dog

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.

The magic patch

At one of the more remote points of our dog walk, I started noticing a textured patch that gave no clue what caused it, or could have caused it. And never seemed to have had anything walk through it.

Since it seemed to occur every day, untouched, I put a footprint in the middle of it as an experiment.

And the next day find the pattern again, with no sign of my footprint from 24 hours before.

So what’s going on here?

A new car lot

Though not far from us, I hadn’t noticed that a new used-car lot had spring up—as if Uruguay needs another!

When we arrived in Uruguay, I was fond of mimicking something Henry Ford may or may not have said over 100 years ago: In Uruguay, the customer can have a car in any color he wants, as long as it’s silver.

I thought that had changed. Perhaps it has. Perhaps everyone has traded in their silver cars? I’ll be paying more attention….

A little (fast) snake

I think it’s a juvenile falsa crucera de hocico respingado, minus the red bit on the tail. Here’s my visual snake identifier: dbosk.com/snakes.

Fun note about my snake page: it’s simple, but serves a purpose ignored by the 1990s-style Serpentario site it links to – allow you to identify a snake you see. ¡Que concepto! I recently sent the code to them, saying they were welcome to it, and they replied thank you, we’re planning an upgrade to our site soon.

I don’t still have their email from eight years ago, but they said exactly the same thing then.

Reminds me of this t-shirt I probably should have:

My latest invention

Wife asked me to mash some garbanzo beans to make hummus. A potato masher is tedious and relatively ineffective. The electric hand mixer does a good job, but with the slight inconvenience of making an unholy mess if you’re not real careful. And slow.

All of a sudden I got an idea. An old plastic saucer, couple of minutes with the table saw, and…

…blast away on top speed, no problem!