An inquisitive old fart with a camera
General observations, generally during dog walks
Always amusing to spot English words that seem out of place.
And the irony: the dog food container was a freebie from Equilíbrio, the same company. It holds only 15 kg.
So what to do with the “free” 3 kg? Fortunately, we ended up with two of these containers.
Yesterday, suddenly all the dogs were barking — at something just off the trail. Judging by the markings on the back, this doesn’t seem to be the one we saw a week ago.
And then a snake, similar markings to a dead one Syd and I saw. Not sure what’s going on with its tail. About 50 cm long and moving quickly to get away from us..
Here’s Ralf’s photo of the “dinosaur” Benji found the other day.
While Syd knows the entire area like the back of his hand, and has a pretty set route, Ralf likes to wander and explore. The other day we ran across beehives, which I’ve seen before, but wouldn’t be able to find on a map.
How nice to know that honey bees are happy and thriving in Uruguay!
Curiously, none of the other five dogs even acknowledged the lizard’s existence. The human is Ralf, Syd’s brother in law from Germany.
A few days ago, I transplanted three squash seedlings. They’re doing fine, but …
… I now see six. Hmmm. And when I check on the first of the tomatoes I transplanted,
I see six more. On the second transplanted tomato,
SEVEN squash plants! I had given each transplant a healthy amount of the compost I had taken out of our bin just prior, which a few days later
looks like this. Maybe I can get some of these starts to grow at our chacra, where we have plenty of room for sprawling squash vines.
So this is how my garden grows!
The tomato seedlings are in a bed with a fair amount of cilantro, which I also didn’t plant this year.
And yes, I do need to do some weeding.
Though I’ve always considered myself a mountain person, I do enjoy the constant changes of the beach. Today the small waves were washing up and over, forming and immense pool that ran the length of the beach.
Though the camera I bought four years ago can take a panoramic shot, I had no idea how to do that, so sloppily put two images together manually instead.
This is looking back from the direction I came. We crossed this about as far as you can see, where it was ankle deep. As I watched the dog struggling more and more to get his stick, I knew that was changing. Crossing back, the water came up to my thighs! Fortunately warm 😉
On our dog walk today, Syd pointed out how unhealthy many trees looked — should they appear like this in spring? I agreed. The more you look, the more you see. And those strange hazy skies? Syd thinks it’s the result of aerial shpraying, as a certain German we know insists.
After I got home, I took my camera as I walked to the feria (street market). Wow! Lots of unhappy-looking trees, indeed.
Right across the street from us.
Then, in the feria, I ran across Pilar, host of blueberry picking and the feria orgánica (see Atlántida Events in the menu bar above), and asked her.
Yes, she said, the wind has been horrible, regaling me with stories about her torn-up shade arbor, piles of plums on the ground and lost blueberries as well (I’ll see on Saturday morning) because of the recent winds. She says the wind damages branches, allows contaminación and hongos (fungus) and insects to invade the weakened parts of the tree.
Pilar knows her stuff. She advises the Uruguayan government on hemp and marijuana production (former promising, latter disappointing because the chosen distributors — pharmacies — apparently want nothing to with marijuana. Hmm, less profitable than pharmaceuticals? Or something else?).
Anyway, weather’s getting weird, and it may be the result of some “geoengineering.” But for now I’m going with weather, and not aerosols, for the damaged trees. We simply have nothing here like the shpraying I so clearly saw in North Carolina, Spokane, and later developing in Mexico.
Here’s Benji, running out of the surf with our favorite stick. But wait, what’s that out in the water?
A surfer, one of six or so.
What they saw in these surf conditions is quite beyond me. The longest ride I saw lasted perhaps fifteen seconds. This is not a hot surf spot (ever). However, these guys (I assume) have probably known each other since elementary school like Jesse’s friends. It was no doubt great fun for them, with lots to bullshit about later over mate or a beer.
And meanwhile, I’m throwing a stick into the surf, over and over. Which is fun. Kind of. Maybe I should try surfing. I probably wouldn’t crack a couple ribs, as I did with a skateboard in my 40s, nor separate my shoulder as I did with snowboarding in my 40s (both after we became parents of a 12 year old orphaned boy in North Carolina). But it would not work without friends.
The sun, which emerged suddenly in late afternoon, allowed another shot of the erosion of the dunes from the recent storm.
I regret the quality of these pics — when I did the “spooky sunset,” I shot 2 stops down, and forgot to reset the exposure. These are re-exposed through my non-Photoshop “Photoshop.”
OK, Halloween was yesterday, but according to my wife, in Mexico the Day of the Dead includes today, so….
Weird weather lately. Evening yesterday we drove into Montevideo for her eye tests, for vision problems resulting from going abruptly to 3,800 meters (12,500′) when we flew to Cusco, Peru, in July. (We have lived at sea level for seven years.) Left eye: she has had damage to it before going back to 1973, but superficial, not macular “puckering” (I’m serious). For a little over USD 100 we got very sophisticated tomographic tests done with fancy image printouts. I don’t quite understand it all, but as usual — here — they hand you the results you have paid for. Just as you go away with the x-rays or MRI scans or whatever here. Because you paid for them, they’re yours. ¡Que concepto!
Halfway into Montevideo, we experienced a brutal and unusual hail storm — deafening, and no shelter to pull into. I was grateful the windshield didn’t break! But in fact the metal body of the car wasn’t dented either. So I guess it wasn’t that bad.
In the midst of it, however, I could only assume damage was being done.
And then it was over, and everything was sweetness and light again.
Tiranos TembladTV posted four days ago its first Summary of Uruguayan events in seven months. The narrator explains that during this period, more than a thousand videos have accumulated, too many to show all. And then — drum roll — starts the summary of events with a dog barking at a balloon (1:40).
In case you’re new here (or to refresh your memory), here’s where that clip came from (added long after Syd’s comment):
The Summary is fun to watch all the way through. Even if you don’t understand the narration in Spanish, you’ll get the drift. There are a few bits in English.
So — if one dog year equals seven human years, Benji should have gotten 2.14285714285714 minutes (128.5714285714284 seconds) instead of 4 seconds. But the clip I posted originally was only 24 seconds long, and it was the “lead story” here, so good on ya, Benj. You’ve still got potential years of silliness ahead to claim your remaining 124.5714285714284 seconds of fame.