An inquisitive old fart with a camera
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)
I’ll save for another time why I happened to be at a modern art auction at Castells in Montevideo last night.
The auctioneer appears on the right, elevated. At the left, auction house employees bid on behalf of clients on the phone. The guy in front of the painting is doing the same by mobile phone. The waiter approaching the women has a tray with champagne, whiskey, water (sin o con gas), and fizzy brown high-fructose-corn-syrup water.
The pieces sold from USD 1,200 to over USD 30,000 while we were watching.
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.
To be fair, he doesn’t cut it himself (that’s not him in the link above; last time I saw Dardo he was driving a taxi). And he charges me 20-25% less than the going rate: UYP 3,000 (USD 130+) per metric ton. Yes, per ton — I’ve discussed this before.
I just took readings of the stuff I got today: of maybe fifteen samples, most in the high teens-20%, one at 30%, and two at 11-12%.
Alas, there is no more curupay.
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.
It’s the time of the yellow trees. I don’t know what kind they are, but for their own reason they all turn yellow for a while in the middle of winter.
I’ve wondered what they race at the autodrome between here and the airport, and the answer, this weekend, is fuscas, only they refer to them as escarabajos (beetles). Despite my fascination with them (example, example), I won’t be there. Other plans, and it will be cold.
The “Superescarabajos” are reportedly the largest and most popular category here. There will be 30 of them racing.
Something orange in the front yard just caught my eye. When I went to investigate, it had found its way into the drainage ditch. Guess I’d better check the back yard.
We have two phones in our house: one local, and one VOIP with our business number in the United States. The six pictured here comprise neither of those two.
The farthest we brought from Mexico. Nice, solid thing but it dropped and cracked. Next to it, one we bought in Chuy, one of the towns on the Brazilian border where bargains can be found, and stuff brought back duty-free with a foreign passport. I hooked it up after taking the picture, and shortly after hearing it crackle and sputter, chucked it in the trash.
I know we’ve brought phones form the States. But why, and why so many?
Meanwhile, I realize the concept of a land line is kind of quaint. Why spend USD 15 on a phone and not-very-much (a bit over USD 10 last month) for a fixed line, when you can spend USD 500 on a smart phone and a bunch per month for a mobile plan, risk losing the phone and personal data, meanwhile irradiating your brain every time you use it, and your gonads when you carry it in your pocket?
Obviously I’ve thought about these things, their real consequences and costs, and speak with some authority.
Alas, I still feel like a phoney. And an old school phoney at that.
To a North American or European, it might seem a bit bizarre that a woman stopping at a kiosk would make no effort to pull to the side of the road, and instead simply “park” in the middle of the road. And it’s not that there was no traffic — we were stuck for a few minutes waiting to cross the road.
I would probably have to explain to a Uruguayan what’s wrong with this picture from my standpoint.
Es lo que hay.
