An inquisitive old fart with a camera
The patio where I try to grow things in containers.
The side of the house, which an amazing squash plant has made impassible.
One of the avocado trees I planted 12 years ago. The other is on track to produce only a handful this year.
It is the other tree that has produced monsters in years past.
I had to stop when I saw this perfectly silly little car parked near the beach. I’m pretty sure it is too small for me to be able to even sit in, much less drive.
What is it? A Toyota! Specifically, a Toyota Publica from a period when the average Japanese man was under 5’7 “ (170 cm) tall.
You can read about the National Car concept and this one’s specs here. 28 horsepower, 700cc. Fascinating in a small way.
I ordered a book from Amazon in the US. If I lived in the US, I would have received it within three days. But of course I don’t, so I shipped it to Miami whence it was brought by air for USD 12 (under two pounds weight). Plus a few bucks for home delivery.
But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Way ahead.
The Miami shipper delivered it to a local delivery service called DAC. From DAC’s warehouse in Montevideo to my doorstep is roughly 46.5 kilometers, a one hour and five minute drive, according to Google (pronounced google-eh) Maps. So allowing a few minutes for confused DAC employees to fumble around, I could drive there for my package and be back in under two and a half hours.
Assuming an average speed of 6 km/hour, I could walk the same in around 15 hours and 20 minutes.
But let’s go further: if DAC had strapped my book to the back of a giant tortoise and sent it on its way, theoretically (of course the poor thing would have to take breaks) I could have my book in just over 7 days.
(To make it more realistic, we’ll assume the tortoise has more than just one book to deliver.)
Am I being ridiculous? Consider how long DAC took to deliver a package 46.5 km, and you tell me.
That’s over 11 days. The tortoise could have been more than halfway back by the time DAC accomplished its delivery.
Completely pathetic? Maybe not: they were quicker than a 3-toed sloth would have been, given the same task.
Our little freezer in the casita died, fortunately not containing nothing more valuable than a few kilos of doggie hamburger (but oh did it stink after four days!). A prompt home visit by technicians (under USD 12) determined the motor was dead, meaning repair would cost more than replacing the whole thing. So how to get rid of it? One of the guys suggested there was a number for the intendencia you could call.
I still haven’t found that, but I did find a map of home waste collection, showing the different zones, neatly color-coded. Aha! This might be useful! But no, that’s it: just that. No schedules, no legend.
The crazy plant: I took a picture when it was almost the height of the fencing. It was very pretty, very symmetrical. Then it reached my height, and then the gutter, and then some of the branches fell over. Their ends then turned skyward and kept growing.
I suppose I should get rid of it, but instead I’m amazed by it, growing out of a tiny bit of sand that rarely gets water.
Around the corner from us.
Several months ago, we were quite dismayed to find loggers destroying a significant number of trees (and hence shade) where we walk dogs. I just ran across this photo I took, illustrating why it’s less dismaying than it might seem. My shoe is size 13 (45), so that stump grew from nothing to 24″ (61 cm) in 18 years.
In a wonderful book The Hidden Life of Trees, the author tells of doing a core sample of a spruce sapling, the width of this thumb (say, the first two rings) and about a meter tall. He was astounded to discover it was 80 years old!
So the trees will be back, as long as people stop setting fires.
It is widely accepted now that the last big fire was the work of an arsonist.
A first!
We have never before seen a tortoise on the dog walk. You think that, if there were tortoises around, the dogs would have encountered them. But they acted absolutely mystified by this thing that wasn’t moving, but they knew by smell was alive.
We gave them a few minutes to be curious, then left the tortoise in peace.
