You know some days get worse and worse and worse, and some days just keep getting better.
Yesterday was one of those worse and worse days, culminating in my getting home to discover that my basement had been broken into and my lawnmower and about $350 worth of tools had been stolen. My lawnmower which I had JUST gotten refurbished and which had been used a grand total of once since its repair. To say that I was incandescent with rage is to understate the situation. I hope that the worthless lout who nabbed my mower cuts his own foot off with it. Luckily they didn’t get upstairs and take anything else, but jeez. Joel came over and reinforced, nailed shut, and double-locked the old garage door entrance. As I have said before, “bunch of savages in this town.”
Today was quite the opposite. Today was BRILLIANT. This morning’s weather was lovely. It was still cool from an all-night rain, but sunny and bright. For some odd reason, downtown smelled a bit like corn tortillas. I made good headway on several projects and wrapped up some issues left over from the day before. Around noon, I got a call from a colleague with whom I’d gone out on a site visit yesterday asking me if I was available to return to the site today to take some documentation photos. One of my sources of frustration from yesterday was getting to the site to realize that I’d left the camera back in the office, so I was all to happy to go and take care of unfinished business. Also, the co-worker I went out there with is really fun and I figured we’d have a good time and get the job done while we were at it.
The job in question is a streambank-erosion-prevention project; the work has been done for quite a while, and we were basically just checking up on it and documenting how it was working, what native species had established, and if further work would be required downstream. We had the pleasure of climbing down to the streambed and giving everything a thorough look-over. I got to take pictures pretty much every step of the way. I also got some good pictures of a couple of ducks and found the weirdest, most horrifying figurine that somebody had chucked into the stream. It will soon be submitted to the “I Wake Up Screaming” pool on Flickr. Man, it was fun, bushwhacking along the creek banks and taking pictures of the state of things. It was a gorgeous day to be outside and a fun bit of work to do on a Friday afternoon.
The ducks: “quack”
The creepy ceramic thing…I think somebody tried to drown this horror in the creek. It appears to be biting something. Anita opined that it might have been a taco. It could have been playing some sort of instrument. Due to its damage, it appears to be holding its hands over its mouth as it shrieks out in never-ending horror at its own misbegotten existence.
And now it’s officially the weekend, and I am looking at two chill days ahead of me. I’m going to be doing a little thrift-shopping tomorrow since most of my summer tops look like all kinds of hell. Either they’re pretty much used up and ratty, or they never did look any good on me in the first place. I’ll be writing up my fashion incompetence soon, but I am trying to work toward not going around looking like a frumpy dweeb so often.