We often see fascinating tracks in the sand – lizards, beetles, birds – but this track was unlike any we’d seen before. And, luckily, we didn’t have to guess what made it (note how it almost gets blown off track by the wind at 0:23).
Author: doug
Painterly house painting
The other day I opened a half-empty 5-liter paint can to touch up an exterior wall, and it looked and smelled a little like a science experiment. Yuck. So today I stirred it all up with a little fungicida and put it to use.
This looks like a sloppy paint job, but look to the left. It’s worse—the paint stops!
Likewise on the right side: fades out in a slightly painterly fashion. The wall is highly textured, so it takes a lot of paint, and that’s as far as a little over a half gallon of paint goes. For what reason?
Because that’s the part you see out the dining room window. But of course….
Fusca farming?
Welcome to Life among the Easily Amused.™
At our dog-walk takeoff spot, a nondescript lot has been divided between siblings. The kid* Pablo moved in a rather hideous container, obviously offensive to his neighbor—name unknown but friendly (and has poured money into his property)—who then raised his reasonable wall (A) to a pretty-sure-this-doesn’t-meet-code extreme height (B) to extinguish any view of Pablo’s architectural adventures from his home.
VW Beetles are called fuscas here. The origins of this name go back to how Germans pronounce Volkswagen, which sounds more like “folksvahgen.” That, shortened and pronounced in Brazilian Portuguese, morphed into “fusca.” (source). And Pablo had a rotting old white fusca that one can only guess he imagined bringing back to life one day, an amusingly ambitious idea.
Then, a couple weeks ago, what to our wondering eyes should appear but another rotting white fusca! A mate! A team? A farm?
Stay tuned.
Oh, and by the way, Pablo doesn’t live there, and has a drum set he’s (sort of) learning to play.
*context: anyone under 30
The early bird?
OK, not my best videography (ya think?). That’s a bird finishing eating a worm, bit by bit, in the middle of an intersection, oblivious to our two dogs nearby. I have never watched a bird eating a worm in the open. I always imagined they just swallowed them whole, rather than pulling them to pieces. And why in the middle of the road? I just stared, until it occurred to me to record it, which is why you don’t see the juicy bits earlier.
Next time 😉
Late afternoon sky
Complete with bird 😉
When I grow old
Black t-shirts. How did I end up with so many black t-shirts? When I was younger, I hated wearing anything black. When I searched search for men’s t-shirts on Amazon, these were my first, dull choices:
But, willing to dig, I found a set of 12 bright t-shirts – no choice of colors! No need to wonder, will this color look good on me? And even after shipping here, barely more expensive than buying locally. So there we are.
And yes, I do have a couple of purple t-shirts as well.
The Thing.
Yesterday on the dog walk I said to Syd, You know, if that thing suddenly started moving, we’d be in the middle of a helluva a horror movie.
Decent sized lizard, that
Seriously large claw marks. That’s a size 13 shoe for comparison. We haven’t seen a live lizard longer than two inches long in a very long time. There was that one once, though….
That would be Colombia, not California
Though it does look like the older license plates we saw when I lived in California as a kid.
Love birds
We’ve had a couple pigeons hanging around for several years now. The pair I saw the most in the past were gray and white. This year they’re both white. They nested on an air conditioning unit upstairs. I saw one eggshell and once the two of them with another, full grown, black and white. Much more interesting than just gray.
As you’ll no doubt agree. Here’s what two two gray pigeons look like.