An inquisitive old fart with a camera
Syd sent me photos he took recently of signs in the Caribbean. Nothing to do with Uruguay, but too good not to pass on.
Nailed to a tree in front of a rather simple house in Bequia, Grenadines. Don’t trouble with trying to parse it.
All’s ill that ends L?
That awkward moment when you realize your drink’s been drinking. In the morning, no less.
The squall-like wind did not last long the other day, but it came from every direction, which is why I so thoroughly sealed the stairway windows.
In Atlántida, a rather majestic tree was uprooted, taking part of the sidewalk with it. I don’t think winching it back into place is an option. Too bad.
A few meters away, the roots of another tree that fell the same direction, but was cut up to clear the street.
On a less-traveled street, a red rag warns passersby of a downed cable.
You’ll recall that Christmas Day 2016 was dreary as could be.
So was New Year’s Day. I’m starting to wonder if this forecast “hot and dry” summer might end up looking like 2014.
I “repaired” the incompetent window installer’s botched fix (see first link above). Turns out when he smeared everything with silicon, he covered up the drain hole. Someone else advised me to drill holes on the outside channel every 20 cm or so, and I drilled through the aluminum — but forgot to cut away the silicon on the outside. Anyway, in the yesterday’s bad storm, it (finally) didn’t leak.
The rain cleared and we had a lovely sunset at 8:30,
and a clear view of the waxing moon.
The second of January didn’t bode well. I got bitten by a dog.
Alas, it was my own dog. Accosted by an obnoxious and too-often-loose dog, Benji and Syd’s five predictably went crazy. Apparently when I pulled Benji back quickly he assumed my leg was the enemy. No harm done.
And another lovely sunset.
Yesterday brought the unusual sight of a fake soccer ball in a ditch, not far from where I once saw two real soccer balls in the ditch.
And I noticed for the first time that the townhouses are finally rented after two-plus years of construction.
Today I noticed that one started ten months ago is finally finished.
Meanwhile at the beach, the saga of the buried boardwalk seems almost over.
The exposed part is getting a little dangerous to walk on (but could be worse),
and while the dune has regained its height on the left, burying the elevated boardwalk, the path of least resistance has once again become the breach in the dune, which is now larger than ever. For a fun comparison of its early days, see this from October 2013.
And a much-traveled beach throwing stick that now — after ten or more trips up and down the beach — probably deserves to be retired.
Finally, more rain is forecast. I’m ready!
No, these are not in progress. They are finished. They are above the stairs, where no one sees them, and even though I have repeated sealed them, after water pouring down the wall inside during yesterday’s rain/wind storm I said enough! The goop I happened to have on hand is white.
They don’t even open. I intend to replace them with glass blocks eventually.
Alas, I didn’t think to set the app to save the original photo. But look!
All variations crested in a few minutes using Prisma, free app on iPad/Android.
Here’s one from July in Cuzco, Peru. I thought this was a pretty dramatic shot.
But look what Prisma does for it!
Is painting over?
cool summer eve
but holidays
and traffic
and motorcycles
up the coast highway
and the two-lane beach road
many thousand RPM
no police but once
i did hear a siren
and many thousand RPM
went to zero
for a while
(their noise annoys
perhaps more than the neighbors
who cut their lawn
with a weedeater)
but gratitude is key in life
and for healthy young organs
more likely to be shared
at many thousand RPM
i suppose we should say
thank you
in advance
The room in which my tiny office space resides was recently repainted, which involved removing a bookshelf. After I replaced it, I realized I didn’t want all that stuff back on it. Including a little pile of journals I’ve kept off and on over the years. I think about getting rid of them, but they’re full of gems.
May 1991: my accelerated Mac SE operates at 20 MHz and has a 105 MB hard drive and a 19″ black and white monitor. Current: 5 year old Mac Mini operating at 2.3 GHz (115 times faster) with 500 GB hard drive (4,876 times greater capacity).
September 1993: my Mac IIsi has 17 MB of RAM. Current: 16 GB (964 times more). That was the computer I used to put together Post Card Passages. Each full-page image required 32 MB, so every time I made a change to an image it switched to virtual memory, and I’d listen to the hard drive chattering for several minutes. Maybe go to the kitchen and brew a fresh pot of coffee.
In a later one, a page bookmarked by a $5 bill from Trinidad and Tobago.
In 1989, I served on the board of the Northwest Association of Book Publishers.
“Special Bylaws. Meeting #3 (or is it 4?) — like doing jury duty. Wrote ‘Another way of looking at Professor X’ afterwards:
A silent moan when X is found
at monthly meetings of our board,
his academics to expound
with functionality ignored.”
I don’t remember who Professor X was.
And going back to the mid 1980s, sketches from Florence, Italy.
This probably from home, Hochheim am Main, West Germany.
So *sigh* guess what has just gone back on the bookshelf
And in case we needed another reminder where we are — well, let me put this another way. Do you think that a person who makes his living installing windows should know how to install windows? If you answered yes, clearly you haven’t spent much time in Uruguay.
What makes this even “better” — the guy who installed it has already been back once to fix the leaks.
And this is not BK Aluminios, an incredibly bad but high-profile business. It’s a little mom-and-pop shop that at least pretends to care.
Stocking up at the butcher shop for the holidays, we decided to try a pollo relleno (stuffed chicken). We had a choice: salado or dulce (salty or sweet). We chose the former, hearing that the latter had things like pineapples inside it. The guy helping us could have, but didn’t, explain what the salado stuffed shicken contained. Perhaps I should have known (ya think?).
Susan’s comment after cooking and cutting it open: How did a hard-boiled egg get in there?
Seems like I should have a clever which came first? comment, but I don’t.
A friend generously brought me a cactus shortly after we moved here. One of my son’s friends figured out what kind of cactus it was, and stole a chunk. I never learned anything more about that. The whole top part you see is what has regrown in six years since he cut a chunk off.
Alas, a recent windstorm broke two of the three branches — but not the new one!
I gave away the tip of one branch. The other I planted. The bright green indicates new growth.
And the broken branches are busy regenerating as well.
Alas, two bits don’t seem to be faring very well.
Maybe I’ll have to find another use for them?
Since we’ve recently had painting done, we thought it time to try to address some persistent moisture problems on parts of the wall that couldn’t be painted. Inside, our new do-anything guy removed all the revoque (surface) of a section of wall, drilled lots of holes, and set bottles of Igol Infiltración, which eventually empty themselves into the surrounding brick and waterproof it. We hope.
Outside, despite being almost directly below a valley in the roof where the most water pours off, the owner/builder apparently made no provision for waterproofing the subterranean part of the sunken living room wall. Even though fixed in place, the pretty-but-shitty window on the right allows water into the wall as well.
Meanwhile, our Namibian tenant in the campo sought advice from a local South African with lots of building experience, and the two launched into solving water problems on the flat roof there. Typical of Uruguayan construction, the bottom of the drain pipe was slightly above the lowest part of the roof, leaving pooled water to soak through the inevitable cracks in the concrete.
I helped somewhat, but mostly watched and listened, trying to sort out what they were saying to each other in Afrikaans.
Between the to-and-froing, I managed to take Benji walking with all his buddies, and saw this decent-sized spider casually making its way across our path.