My dog wanders near the dunes. A couple approaches her with a large black Labrador Retriever. My dog slinks away. The big dog starts toward me, as if to say hello, then walks into the water and plops down.
Category: Nature
General observations, generally during dog walks
The mirage ships
Weeks away from being here five years, walking most days with dogs to the beach, and I’ve never seen this. We’ve had a couple lovely days in the mid to high 70s (°F), but wet and colder weather is due to return presently.
Mont Saint-Michel
Well, sort of. Not my doing. I like the little posts lining the entrance.
Shadow
Planter logs
Since I had both dogs on leashes, I walked the way I used to, before. It has been a while. The big eucalyptus tree has finally been cut up, and some of the logs turned into planters. Interesting idea.
Green-barred woodpecker
After shooting the short video, I closed the door and the bird flew away from the car …
… only to settle on a chair outside my office window (also a favorite of the cat).
Green-barred Woodpecker (Colaptes melanochloros)
French: Pic vert et noir
German: Grünbindenspecht
Spanish: Carpintero Real or Carpintero Nuca Roja (Red-naped Woodpecker)
Other common names: Green-barred Flicker; Golden-breasted Woodpecker (melanolaimus group)
(Thanks to Jim Wiemann for the identification)
Totally irresponsible
Heading up from the beach, I saw a column of smoke rising. Before crossing the dunes, putting my shoes on, I heard men’s voices. Getting to the road, I saw a blazing, untended fire not far from one of the flammable garbage containers.
Twenty meters further, a woman backed out of her driveway, stopped by me and said ¡Que horrible! I asked her who did it. Los jardineros. But there’s nobody here, I replied. It appears that the gardeners who had been working nearby piled up the brush, lit it on fire, and left for the day.
I’ve mentioned this behavior before, but this is a little extreme.
But hey, it was time to go home.
Cero.
Zero degrees Celsius this morning (32° F). The sun made quick work of this frost on the car, as it did last year and the year before.
Yesterday our neighbors from the campo stopped by in town, commented on how cold it was, and taught me a new saying: Julio los prepara y agosto se los lleva. July prepares something and August takes them. Huh?
Old people, they explained. The two coldest months of the year.
Julio los prepara y agosto se los lleva.
Julio los prepara y agosto se los lleva.
Brazil in flames?
I left the house about the time of the start of the World Cup semi-final match between Germany and host Brazil. On my walk, I saw something burning in the east, smoke plume extending far over the water.
When I got back to the house, I could scarcely believe it: Germany ahead at the half 5-0. I looked more carefully at another photo.
No, the smoke was between us and Piriápolis. And besides, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where the match was played, is northeast, not east, of us.
But I expect for the Brazilians, not only has their chance to win the World Cup gone up in smoke, so has their national pride. It wouldn’t surprise me that the burn from this will be worse even than their 1950 defeat by their little neighbor Uruguay. Billions of dollars spent, 260 million of which on a stadium that will never again see any significant use after just four games, embarrassing delays and infrastructure failures, and now total, and I do mean total, humiliation at the feet of the flawless German futbol machine.
7-1. A record number of goals scored in a World Cup semi-final match. Ouch, Brazil.
Mold season in Uruguay
If you hail from, and live in, a place where building construction techniques have changed in the last couple centuries, you may be thinking, “oh, interesting. I wonder when mold season is in Uruguay?”
But, no, it‘s an inside joke for locals. When is mold season in Uruguay?
All. Damn. Year.
Meet my new BFF: cloro puro, not the overpriced, diluted crap sold in orange bottles (which have their own recycle container at the local waste processing/recycling operation). In this case no doubt sold in a recycled bottle.
Remembering Syd’s tales of protective eye wear and scrubbing ceilings black with mold, I realize I had it relatively easy the last couple days (wasn’t even this bad), but it has been a bit of work. 1.5 liters of bleach consumed yesterday and today, and much of yesterday ended up consumed in the entirely enjoyable project of helping one of my son’s friends (early twenties) build a 6′ high bookshelf (the event also involved the death of the circular saw I bought for $40 from one of Syd‘s strange tenants [our only tenants turned out stranger still] AND a Hyundai angle grinder that went up in smoke for no apparent reason).
Simple accounts lead to stories and more stories and more than you need to know. Perhaps another time.