Years ago I dug up a little nothing-special bush in the back yard and planted it to the right of the driveway, where it grew and grew, exploding with white flowers every spring. Then I found another, and planted it to the left, imagining one day an arch of flowers over the driveway.
This year we’re pretty much there, though the effect isn’t exactly as master-Japanese-gardener as I envisioned. In fact, both could use some serious pruning, but neither is getting it yet, because…
I’m not sure I have ever experienced this before: the mesmerizing aerial dance of swallows feeding (presumably on mosquitoes—yesss!).
Not in this clip, but an hornero bird returned to its nest atop the power pole with a single screech, entirely atypical because their normal call is long and loud. It was as though it found the air traffic overwhelming, and I would have to agree. A moment later, it moved lower onto the wire, and when a swallow tried to land on the wire near it…well, it was not happy about that.
We’ve seen plenty of tarantulas on our dog walks, and I’ve taken plenty of photos and video, but I’ve never noticed one walking across sand – and leaving no track! At least none that I would have found convincing.
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).
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….
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.
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.
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.
