I will not be parking in the aloe vera.

Now that the wretched sitzbad is gone, I finally found someone to finish the shower in our little country place. The well has not been run in a long time, and it’s summer and water levels are down, and what’s coming out now is pretty sulfurous and brown and nasty, so for mixing cement I have been taking water from here in 6-liter Salus water bottles which I gather when I can from the recycling containers. They’ve been scarce lately for some reason.

Cut to this morning, reading Clif High’s extension of Bloom’s Taxonomy…OK, here’s an excerpt:

A significant difference is that Bloom ended his context on thinking with meta-cognition as an active tool, used on occasion to ‘tune’ your thinking about how to learn. He did not conceive of meta-cognition as an active, on-going, self analytical, in real time self monitoring, developing perpetual state of process. Thus in Bloom’s model, such humans as display psychic or ‘enlightenment’ abilities are completely excluded. In my model they are merely expressions of higher order thinking that is always, continuing, and continuously seeking to manifest at more advanced levels.

Then I walked to the feria (street market) past the recycling containers, only to see something I’ve never seen before.

Someone had actually tied a bunch of empty 6-liter Salus bottles to the outside of one of them, just in case someone was needing a bunch of them…?

Yesterday saw an almost-heroic purge of 16 years of acquired workshop/play space flotsam—small coils of wire, plumbing fixtures I’ll never use, lookalike Argentine electrical fixtures that don’t play well with Uruguayan counterparts, hardware oddities carefully saved over the years because of course.

Between a weedeater and dog food, I was up to three freebie promotional beach umbrellas which, despite appearance, have never had any real use. And certainly not recently.

So I posted them as giveaways on our neighborhood Whatsapp group. Our neighbor Álvaro immediately claimed one, and someone else said her daughter would love to have one and she’d be here to pick it up in un ratito, which means “a little while” in English, which means maybe an hour and a half in Uruguay.

When she arrived, she was thrilled with the brand new umbrella (with the name of some dog food I’d never heard of—where does this stuff come from?), and held out as a thank you a cold 1.5 liter bottle of Coke Zero.

Which is close to the last thing I would think of actually drinking. I thanked her graciously, and immediately started wondering what am I going to do with this stuff? Then I remembered all the wonderful internet claims: clean dirty grout! Half a bottle later in the shower, uh, no. Speed up compost by adding sugar…uh, no. Clean oil stains in the garage! Uh…no. Clean rust off tools? Another day, perhaps *sigh*.

A hand towel hanging on our refrigerator.

Some time ago, the little vertical plastic box atop this vent pipe blew off. The box went into the neighbors’ yard, and since there’s rarely anyone there, I didn’t bother to pursue.

The plastic grate landed in our yard, and I hung onto it. Until today. In a sudden urge to purge, I started cleaning out my work area, chucking this and many other useless things.

Then, carrying trash to the house, I see this on the ground.

Obviously not where it was meant to be.

An hour from now, I wouldn’t have had a replacement, but now that you mention it….

A perfect circle in the middle of the road. Why? How? No clue. I don’t think it’s a rudimentary crop circle, but you never know.

In other news today, the first large lizard we’ve seen in years – easily two feet long. Syd practically tripped over it. I pulled out my phone and started a video … except I didn’t. Something about trying to hit the on-screen tiny video button in full sunlight. So I pressed the button to start and stop recording, and ended up with two snapshots of nothing, since it was moving through undergrowth. Well, next time. Stay tuned! But don’t hold your breath.