Just some little bits and pieces of thoughts of late:
- The other night when I was coming home from work, I had one of those absolutely glorious and magical rides that just makes you happy to be alive and pedalling. It has been surprisingly cool and rainy lately and there’s quite a lot of marshy land along the river and in the bottoms. Because the habitats are so ideal right now, there are a correspondent quantity of frogs gettin’ froggy wid’ it down along the river. Pretty much from the Woodswether bridge until you hit the foot of Strawberry hill, there was a constant serenade of frog calls. Besides the joyful noise of horny amphibians, it was just a really nice night. Cool but not chilly, and since it’s been raining so much lately, the air just smelled clean and pleasantly grassy/earthy.
- Apropos of nothing, the other day a story popped into my head about one of my dad’s buddies in his young, single days. Dad’s friend Doug was, at the time, a young man who had recently gotten his first place and was learning the ropes of householding. He’d gotten himself a hell of a deal on a whole chicken at the grocery, but realized when he got home that he had no idea of how to prepare it. So what did Doug do, who owned no cookbooks and who was batching it in the days before Google? He called Information! In those heady days of the late 1970s, not only did he get a live operator, he got one who was both bored and kindhearted enough to verbally walk him through the process of preparing his chicken!
- Joel’s getting the fever! Trashboat Fever! He borrowed James’s kayak the other day and floated from Kaw Point to the Berkeley boat ramp and said that the water’s fine and fast. Ruby and I waited for him down at Berkeley with the truck and Miss Roo had a fine and mighty time digging in the riverside sand, sniffing new sniffable things, and randomly pee-ing on this and that. In short it was an ideal outing for a nosy young dog.
Ruby’s “little” buddy Bagheera sprained his left-front paw and so right now neither of them can play together and it’s making both of them nuts. I hear him over there barking and grizzling because he’s got loads of puppy-energy and can’t run it off, and Ruby hears him whining and gets whipped up into her own ridiculous puppy-energy frenzy and is starting to drive me a little bit nuts. I had her fetching tonight which seems to have taken the edge off of her crazies, but only an edge- Today was the ACME Saturday Ride, and it was a darn nice cruise. We got to roll past a very cool custom car show down in the West Bottoms. Wish I’d had a little more time to truly check out and appreciate the results of a lot of creativity, hard work, and investment, but I did get a few photos of some of the rides, so I’ll post those tomorrow
- I bought a highly offensive pair of “shoes” today for $2.98. Joel and I were checking out the thrift shops because he wanted to get a couple of more pair of dress pants to turn into shorts, and I’m trying to find another pair of barely-used Dr. Martens to replace the pair that Ruby ate (that was a serious bummer, and one of the few really obnoxious things that she’s ever done). I’d also been thinking about getting a pair of Crocs for wearing around the house, and now, for the lordly sum of just slightly less than three dollars, I have a pair of yellow-and-pink swirled Airwalk brand “crocs” for kickin’ around home. I have just treated them with a generous misting of bleach and expect that they will be fine lounging-around shoes. Slippers that can go into the garden. Good enough for me. I just have to keep ’em out of Ruby’s reach, ’cause she really seems to relish the texture of Croc.
So yeah. That’s about it over here. Got another sewing project brewing, a couple of brewing projects in the planning stages, and an all-girls alleycat that I really need to get to crackin’ on. It’s a good gig, this kind of life.