An inquisitive old fart with a camera
The antique Commer truck. September 2012:
December 2014 – mistakenly thought to be a different one:
January 2016: and yet again, parked at the zoo:
Alas, on a dreary day in 2019, that sad truck that appears to have finally reached the end of the line:
Interesting to reflect that this truck was built the year I was born. Happy to report I’m holding up better….
3°C (37.4°F) in the back yard, which never (there I go, tempting fate) gets frost. Beautiful clear sky, as last night.
First frost is apparently a little later than usual this year.
There may be a story here … or not.
Pigeon on TV antenna. Yes, weather that dreary.
A dead penguin on the beach.
An appeal to ecological awareness, which caused me to remark how surprisingly free of plastic waste the beach in fact was.
And a surprise: the fishing platform mostly gone – it has been a long time since I walked on the beach.
It always had room for several people … no more.
And Mocha never stopped running the entire time – so many new things to smell!
The beautiful sunny days faded into more typical dreariness, and though it wasn’t cold-cold (do people say such things elsewhere?), a fire beckoned last night. We have a good supply of wood, and anything that decreases humidity is welcome almost any time, so it wasn’t difficult decision.
And The Committee approved.
A little security company mini-minivan pulled partway into our driveway and beeped the horn. When I went out front, the driver got out, leaving two (three?) people sitting in the car.
He was offering a security special of free installation something yadda yadda. I told him we had lived here almost ten years with dogs and no security company, and that the only problem we’d had during that time was the alarms of our absentee neighbors’ systems going off at all hours for no apparent reason.
Still, I asked him about what they had. And whether they were local.
No, not local, he said, but they have detectors with cameras, and when they pick up a signal, an operator checks the camera and calls the police if things look suspicious. I asked enough more to determine that dogs and cat would set off the alarm continuously, and his solution for that was to keep the animals in a segregated part of the house, and … ¡chau! Mr Security Man.
Though of course the idea of giving complete strangers the ability to activate cameras inside my house at any time … how could one not feel warm and fuzzy and secureabout that?
This will be a little obscure to someone who hasn’t actually suffered through daily life in Acodike’s Uruguay. Gas for cooking (“Supergas”) comes in metal gas bottles sold by many vendors. All have phone numbers, and will bring gas on demand for a slight charge. And of course everyone has a cell phone, so anyone can phone anytime, anywhere, and have replacement gas within a few minutes.
However, one company thinks we still live in the 1990s, and has its drivers – apparently on commission, based on their wasteful repetition and overlap – drive back and forth endlessly, with a tinny and piercing version of Beethoven’s Für Elise screeching at high volume. Yes, the ice cream truck “music,” but not tempting you once a day. No, just driving up and back every street, occasionally turning the noise off abruptly, which makes it no less jarring. Not every truck is the same, and I’ve heard as many as three different ones in the space of a couple of hours.
Everyone (above a certain level of awareness, with the bar set pretty low) hates them. But they just persist with their noise pollution, because es lo que hay – that’s how it is.
Today – blissfully! – we have reached the afternoon without their intrusion. From being an acoustic hell the last few days, Uruguay suddenly seems like a nice place to live again.
“So, the heaviest tourist season is over. What now?”
“Well you know that heavily-used pedestrian crossing by the Playa Mansa?”
“Of course. Leading to the most crowded beach, saw a lot of pedestrian traffic. Typical January. What about it?”
“It’s kinda faded.”
“You’re right. Now that the bulk of the tourists are gone, this might be a good time to repaint it. You know, so cars can see it better. Safety thing.”
“My thinking exactly.”
Our timing was bad, but our location could have been worse. Walking dogs at 5:00 PM, Syd and I got rained on to the point that I decided going into an air-conditioned supermarket in wet cotton might not be the best idea. And it was necessary: we were out of wine! It’s not killer air conditioning as in the Untied Snakes, but I remember well from my days as a summer camp counselor in Maine: Cotton Kills. Hypothermia is not your friend.
Home, just a couple kilometers away, we had received a lot of rain – pooling in streets, filling drainage ditches. I showered, changed clothes, waited for the rain to abate, and took off again for the 4-5 minute drive to Tienda Inglesa.
Not. The entire town was gridlocked/stop-and-start. I thought I could come at T.I. from the back, but that involved the Rambla (beach front road), which was no better. This is what I saw of the stoppage:
The red represents gridlocked or stop-and-start traffic. The 4-5 minute trip from A to B took at least 30 minutes.
The trip back was significantly quicker, traveling the right direction on the Ruta Interbalnearia:
Those cars headed west toward Montevideo appear that they may be moving slowly. They’re not. They’re stopped.
So I’m a little puzzled: this shouldn’t be “turnover” day – once upon a time, families here spent a month on vacation, but now it’s two weeks, and that turnover’s not for another couple days.
Sure, it’s Sunday, and the weather suddenly went pear shaped.
Wild….