My husband is one of the Good Ones. One of the sour, grumpy, curmudgeonly, opinionated ones, but one of the good ones. After many years and many men I think I've found the way to identify the Good Ones - through the way they treat pets, especially pets which are not their own.
My husband never particularly wanted a parakeet. He didn't interact too much with them when the whole horde of parakeets were downstairs, except that I'd occasionally find he'd made sure the door to their flight was latched securely, and he was the driver on a few late-night vet missions. His pets were the beta fish and the lizards we kept inheriting as rescues. He liked to watch for new bubble nests in the fish tank, and was proud when they showed up because it meant he'd gotten the water and the food and the plants right and made the fish happy. The water dragons loved heights. He liked to let the larger water dragon, named Spazz, climb to the highest point available in a room, which was often the top of his hat. He didn't love the blue-tongued skink as much but still tried to keep it properly moisturized, and fed a healthy diet. I'm the one who messes up everyone's diet since I loved to save some of the fish eggs from my sushi to feed to the delighted beta, and I loved to cut up apples to give to the skink, which made it make the most joyous face a lizard with only one expression can make, and made it move faster than a snail which was unusual. I also feed my brother in law's dog crackers and cheese when we see him every year or two, since it's the only time I get to spoil the dog. Contrary to the innocent expression on my husband's face, I am not the person who originally fed the dog the Swedish Fish, that was the innocent looking husband. My brother in law should know by now that any time my husband looks innocent he is in fact the culprit.
So, getting back to the start of that last paragraph, my husband is the lizardfishdog guy. He is not the bird guy - the birds were mine. Originally I had a flock of four, and one by one over the years they've passed away. Now I have one little bird left, a pretty even-tempered cub scout of a parakeet, two and a half inches of opinion with a three inch tail, and he'd die of loneliness in the pet room by himself so we've moved him up to the office, where his smaller cage now occupies the spot to my husband's left. It has taken him a little while to settle down from flighted wild flock member to computer companion to humans, but he's adjusted gradually and I think we do make a difference to his loneliness. He's gone from being pretty skittish to being pretty bossy, as a comfortable parakeet will tend to be, with all five inches of blue and yellow poofed out. He tends to move to the back to rest when we're out at work, and come out to see us when we return. If he's in a standoffish mood he stays on the second to furthest perch. If he wants to interact, he comes to the second to closest perch. If he is really jonesing for interaction he'll come sit on a little blue perch I put in the absolute front corner. If we're elsewhere in the house he'll yell 'til we respond and sometimes keep yelling. He knows me as the source of good food, treats, compliments and toe nail clippings, which is enough to keep me in the role of betrayer. He knows my husband as the source of that great clicking noise when typing like wildfire, blues and metal music to which he loves to yell along, and most of the interesting shows on the computer, to which my husband is normally attached most waking hours at home. The bird may be my child but he's my husband's hang-out buddy, and has taken to sitting on the little blue perch staring at the computer to see what my husband is up to at all times.
My husband, in turn, has also adapted. While he occasionally comes through telling me "YOUR BIRD sounds like an air raid siren," he more often comes through telling me stories about what the bird is up to - "He keeps putting up his foot to rest, getting interested in what I'm doing, and falling over when he leans forward to look." He's learned that when giving the bird a spray bath it's important to spray all the plastic chains and bells since those chains are his favorite toy when covered with water. He's learned that the bird likes oat sprays best and likes stealing plastic Starbucks stir sticks from any human holding one. But I catch him in little moments liking the bird better than he admits. He has conversations with the bird, and changes the music depending on what the bird is in the mood for (anything with fast guitar has immediate approval, other things depend on bird whim). At night, when he pulls the cover over the bird's cage, he lifts the edge to say good night one more time. It's the last one that lets me know what kind of dad my husband would be.
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Friday, November 9, 2012
Goals
So, as usual I have so many huge goals I'm only making minimal progress on any given one of them, and hiding from them a lot of the time.
Some of my goals I've been doing a lot on, like practicing my jewelry art, because they are driven by deadlines and I rarely miss deadlines.
Some of my goals I accomplish, but never as perfectly as I wish, like increasing the amount of cash brought in every year by the charity literacy auction and making it on site to manage the auction despite being half crippled by a recent leg injury, but not making it to most meetings because the time of year is in total conflict with my other annual events and not being able to take stuff dropped off in advance because I don't drive so I don't have a way to carry it around with my bad back. I've already created an account for the auction which includes organized folders sorted annually for addresses and solicitation of applications, actual applications, auction questions from the public, auction management notes, notification of final results, and forms storage. I'd like to get a web site going as a sub-page on the convention home site for the con where I run this auction, and post things like the year's charity cause and end results (easy), requirements and forms for new applications (pretty easy), and descriptions of things being donated prior to the auction (harder, since people waffle about what they might bring, and because any pictures would require having the items in hand and I can't do that easily because I don't have a car to lug them around with).
Some of my goals I sabotage, like paying off all my debts, because there are things I "need" to support my art (some things legitimately - can't go without more resin or more print supplies, some things less so - can't go without that new lacy-edged setting, when really it does provide a lot of inspiration but I could work on other pieces with what I have in hand), or because there are things I love so much I buy them every few years even though they don't fit practically in my budget (candied rose petals), or because I have things I want which I could get for less if I took the time to do it but I'm using that time on all my other goals (books, which could come from the library except that the trip takes hours away from jewelry making).
Some of my goals I sabotage accidentally, by falling off things all the time and crippling myself (seriously, I tripped on nothing whatsoever on the sidewalk this week, just fell over, and sprained my ankle). Last month I slipped on loose rubble under leaves and removed most of my knee tissue and ended up going to work with my entire leg bloody, I have fallen down the stairs in my house, I have fallen off the roof of my house and had my hip land on brick, I have fallen off a wet rock and drowned in a mountain stream. I have stood flat footed in decent boots on a parking lot with a .2% grade and a few tiny crystals of ice and slowly slid downward toward my husband as he watched in bemusement. My ancient war with gravity is probably worth a post all its own.
Some of my goals I make a major surge on, like cleaning up and organizing the house, then get swamped under the amount of time and stuff loaded on and then distracted by going back to my major goals again. (Jewelry art, whatever it may accomplish, does *not* lead to a clean house.) I finally admitted my inherited hormonal imbalance was bad enough I had to go on medication for it (were the first three people who killed themselves a good clue?), and that's helped wonderfully but now I've been off it for a week due to the stomach flu which didn't let me keep the pills down. So I am sitting here thinking "I'm tough enough I shouldn't need that medication," which is the brilliant thinking that got me to the point where I crashed badly and had to admit I needed it in the first place, so this weekend I go back on the horse again. Flipping it off with one finger all the way.
Some of my goals I have trouble with for outside reasons, such as clear-cutting my yard when I have severe ongoing back and hip pain (see the note about gravity my ancient enemy, above), and there's no getting around that except to tough it through so it goes in fits and starts when I get up the gumption, but the weeds seem to have more gumption than I do. I have *fabulous* weeds, if they were edible they could feed a country, and the woody ones could build enough bonfires for an entire cohort of Roman soldiers every season if we had any Roman soldiers around who needed them for bonfires.
Some of my goals I stop and start on, like getting my ongoing respiratory and systemic infection issues under control, where I can handle battling the medical system for only so long and then I have to take a break while I run a major show and a literacy auction, and then I go back to it again.
Some of my goals I don't do because I have too high expectations - like doing a regular blog entry or working on "the novel" or writing memoirs, and I want to do it all at once, real big, perfectly written, and there is no such thing as perfectly written in the first place and I'm annoyed that my "voice" changes depending on what old story I'm talking about, and I worry about whether every opinion I have is simply fluff anyway because a lot of it is absolutely two-sided thanks to the mixed cultural upbringing, and a lot of it comes down to "live and let live" and tolerance is every now and then a cop-out not a virtue, and a lot of folks would see most of my philosophy as waffling except for the five or six things where I'm adamant and then I'm bossy. And I also worry about the fact that a lot of my memoirs intimately involve my own foolishness or that of others around me and the former I'd prefer everyone who witnessed it would die happily of old age in the next week or so and the latter will hope I die in the next week or so. On this one, for now, we're going to settle for doing an occasional blog entry and we'll see anyone notices.
Some of my goals, like deciding whether to have children, I never decided were really goals, and it's too late now to accomplish them and I have other goals I've really decided on.
Some of my goals are undermined by my own ambivalence, like learning Japanese again when it comes easily but comes with a freight of cultural burdens and predeterminations, yet I keep them on the "maybe someday" list for whenever I overcome that ambivalence, if I ever do.
Some goals became simply impractical, like continuing the fabulous criminal forensics courses I love at D.U. when I work until late and don't drive to get across town in time and I don't have a travel buddy in any sort of convenient location who would both love the courses and drag me along.
Some of my goals, I accomplished, and time and tide have swept them under and they're gone, like writing out the basics of what happened when I was a kid, which I did and posted online and now the company that bought the company that owned that website has shut it down and it's washed into the internet tide, or rescuing all my old poetry from a destroyed hard drive which I did with a lot of hand typing from old copies but I gave the best pieces to a friend in a box so he could pull from them for an online magazine, and I never did get that box back, or starting a correspondence with someone, which I did once with a lovely sweet and foolish man I loved, and he kept those letters for years but eventually found an amazing woman who would put up with his foolishness but not with the box of letters, and he threw them away instead of sending them back to me. Now I have relatives who wonder why I don't write. By the time I'm done writing what I had to say has changed anyway.
Some of my goals I accomplished in an amazing way after a huge uphill struggle, like finding my wonderful life partner, who only makes me crazy sometimes, and every now and then actually understands what's going on in my head.
I think one of the problems with my goals is that they are all huge. Some because they are that way inherently, such as "become a capable jewelry artisan" and some because they became that way over years, "clean the house" suffering under deposits of records from running a convention, odd assortments of things that surely will be really useful sometime (like a box of hundreds of gashapon balls which did in fact come in useful when I made people in an event "bowl" with ones that had several balls of smaller and smaller sizes stacked inside each one to throw off the balance), items I've collected over the years and things that are silly but I love anyway like a couple dozen beautiful glass vases. I know, the answer to this is to break it down into parts - instead of "become a capable jewelry artisan" choose "learn to attach clasps" or "learn to make knots between pearls." And I have done a ton of those little interim tasks so that I can see my loading bar move slowly from 5% to 12% to 20%. But I've been working on the overall goal long enough to see it as a continuum over decades and despite all the little bits I still track my success on the larger front, and see it frustrated by notable setbacks like resin in several pin mechanisms or resin pours which have to be redone three times before I figure out the humidity is the problem this week. One of the problems is when one goal interferes with another - all of them require time, and since my next step in jewelry work is soldering, getting a full soldering kit will both frustrate paying off debts and add stuff to the house that needs cleaning. One of the problems is that some goals depend on other goals - I won't be able to drive around charity stuff or attend night classes at D.U. until I achieve the debt management and get a car, and I'm still really ambivalent about whether I want a car as well so that particular one goes in circles like a boat with one oar. I can see by now that by the time I die I am still likely to have many many goals where I've just made it to 60%. But given that I expected to die when I was much younger and most of the goals didn't even exist yet, or were at 5% on that guage, overall progress isn't that bad.
Some of my goals I've been doing a lot on, like practicing my jewelry art, because they are driven by deadlines and I rarely miss deadlines.
Some of my goals I accomplish, but never as perfectly as I wish, like increasing the amount of cash brought in every year by the charity literacy auction and making it on site to manage the auction despite being half crippled by a recent leg injury, but not making it to most meetings because the time of year is in total conflict with my other annual events and not being able to take stuff dropped off in advance because I don't drive so I don't have a way to carry it around with my bad back. I've already created an account for the auction which includes organized folders sorted annually for addresses and solicitation of applications, actual applications, auction questions from the public, auction management notes, notification of final results, and forms storage. I'd like to get a web site going as a sub-page on the convention home site for the con where I run this auction, and post things like the year's charity cause and end results (easy), requirements and forms for new applications (pretty easy), and descriptions of things being donated prior to the auction (harder, since people waffle about what they might bring, and because any pictures would require having the items in hand and I can't do that easily because I don't have a car to lug them around with).
Some of my goals I sabotage, like paying off all my debts, because there are things I "need" to support my art (some things legitimately - can't go without more resin or more print supplies, some things less so - can't go without that new lacy-edged setting, when really it does provide a lot of inspiration but I could work on other pieces with what I have in hand), or because there are things I love so much I buy them every few years even though they don't fit practically in my budget (candied rose petals), or because I have things I want which I could get for less if I took the time to do it but I'm using that time on all my other goals (books, which could come from the library except that the trip takes hours away from jewelry making).
Some of my goals I sabotage accidentally, by falling off things all the time and crippling myself (seriously, I tripped on nothing whatsoever on the sidewalk this week, just fell over, and sprained my ankle). Last month I slipped on loose rubble under leaves and removed most of my knee tissue and ended up going to work with my entire leg bloody, I have fallen down the stairs in my house, I have fallen off the roof of my house and had my hip land on brick, I have fallen off a wet rock and drowned in a mountain stream. I have stood flat footed in decent boots on a parking lot with a .2% grade and a few tiny crystals of ice and slowly slid downward toward my husband as he watched in bemusement. My ancient war with gravity is probably worth a post all its own.
Some of my goals I make a major surge on, like cleaning up and organizing the house, then get swamped under the amount of time and stuff loaded on and then distracted by going back to my major goals again. (Jewelry art, whatever it may accomplish, does *not* lead to a clean house.) I finally admitted my inherited hormonal imbalance was bad enough I had to go on medication for it (were the first three people who killed themselves a good clue?), and that's helped wonderfully but now I've been off it for a week due to the stomach flu which didn't let me keep the pills down. So I am sitting here thinking "I'm tough enough I shouldn't need that medication," which is the brilliant thinking that got me to the point where I crashed badly and had to admit I needed it in the first place, so this weekend I go back on the horse again. Flipping it off with one finger all the way.
Some of my goals I have trouble with for outside reasons, such as clear-cutting my yard when I have severe ongoing back and hip pain (see the note about gravity my ancient enemy, above), and there's no getting around that except to tough it through so it goes in fits and starts when I get up the gumption, but the weeds seem to have more gumption than I do. I have *fabulous* weeds, if they were edible they could feed a country, and the woody ones could build enough bonfires for an entire cohort of Roman soldiers every season if we had any Roman soldiers around who needed them for bonfires.
Some of my goals I stop and start on, like getting my ongoing respiratory and systemic infection issues under control, where I can handle battling the medical system for only so long and then I have to take a break while I run a major show and a literacy auction, and then I go back to it again.
Some of my goals I don't do because I have too high expectations - like doing a regular blog entry or working on "the novel" or writing memoirs, and I want to do it all at once, real big, perfectly written, and there is no such thing as perfectly written in the first place and I'm annoyed that my "voice" changes depending on what old story I'm talking about, and I worry about whether every opinion I have is simply fluff anyway because a lot of it is absolutely two-sided thanks to the mixed cultural upbringing, and a lot of it comes down to "live and let live" and tolerance is every now and then a cop-out not a virtue, and a lot of folks would see most of my philosophy as waffling except for the five or six things where I'm adamant and then I'm bossy. And I also worry about the fact that a lot of my memoirs intimately involve my own foolishness or that of others around me and the former I'd prefer everyone who witnessed it would die happily of old age in the next week or so and the latter will hope I die in the next week or so. On this one, for now, we're going to settle for doing an occasional blog entry and we'll see anyone notices.
Some of my goals, like deciding whether to have children, I never decided were really goals, and it's too late now to accomplish them and I have other goals I've really decided on.
Some of my goals are undermined by my own ambivalence, like learning Japanese again when it comes easily but comes with a freight of cultural burdens and predeterminations, yet I keep them on the "maybe someday" list for whenever I overcome that ambivalence, if I ever do.
Some goals became simply impractical, like continuing the fabulous criminal forensics courses I love at D.U. when I work until late and don't drive to get across town in time and I don't have a travel buddy in any sort of convenient location who would both love the courses and drag me along.
Some of my goals, I accomplished, and time and tide have swept them under and they're gone, like writing out the basics of what happened when I was a kid, which I did and posted online and now the company that bought the company that owned that website has shut it down and it's washed into the internet tide, or rescuing all my old poetry from a destroyed hard drive which I did with a lot of hand typing from old copies but I gave the best pieces to a friend in a box so he could pull from them for an online magazine, and I never did get that box back, or starting a correspondence with someone, which I did once with a lovely sweet and foolish man I loved, and he kept those letters for years but eventually found an amazing woman who would put up with his foolishness but not with the box of letters, and he threw them away instead of sending them back to me. Now I have relatives who wonder why I don't write. By the time I'm done writing what I had to say has changed anyway.
Some of my goals I accomplished in an amazing way after a huge uphill struggle, like finding my wonderful life partner, who only makes me crazy sometimes, and every now and then actually understands what's going on in my head.
I think one of the problems with my goals is that they are all huge. Some because they are that way inherently, such as "become a capable jewelry artisan" and some because they became that way over years, "clean the house" suffering under deposits of records from running a convention, odd assortments of things that surely will be really useful sometime (like a box of hundreds of gashapon balls which did in fact come in useful when I made people in an event "bowl" with ones that had several balls of smaller and smaller sizes stacked inside each one to throw off the balance), items I've collected over the years and things that are silly but I love anyway like a couple dozen beautiful glass vases. I know, the answer to this is to break it down into parts - instead of "become a capable jewelry artisan" choose "learn to attach clasps" or "learn to make knots between pearls." And I have done a ton of those little interim tasks so that I can see my loading bar move slowly from 5% to 12% to 20%. But I've been working on the overall goal long enough to see it as a continuum over decades and despite all the little bits I still track my success on the larger front, and see it frustrated by notable setbacks like resin in several pin mechanisms or resin pours which have to be redone three times before I figure out the humidity is the problem this week. One of the problems is when one goal interferes with another - all of them require time, and since my next step in jewelry work is soldering, getting a full soldering kit will both frustrate paying off debts and add stuff to the house that needs cleaning. One of the problems is that some goals depend on other goals - I won't be able to drive around charity stuff or attend night classes at D.U. until I achieve the debt management and get a car, and I'm still really ambivalent about whether I want a car as well so that particular one goes in circles like a boat with one oar. I can see by now that by the time I die I am still likely to have many many goals where I've just made it to 60%. But given that I expected to die when I was much younger and most of the goals didn't even exist yet, or were at 5% on that guage, overall progress isn't that bad.
Still on Colfax, Still in Love
A bit of a hiatus, but I'm still here, and still living next to Colfax Avenue, with all its wonders, part of the longest highway in the country and passing through the most diverse part of our weirdly diverse state.
It's our normal beautiful blue sky red-leaves Indian Summer, the period after the first snow where we catch a few weeks to a month that is as lovely as late Spring, with cool fresh breezes and rustling of small things in the wind.
My husband and I are pleased with the variety of outfits worn by the fellow who catches the bus near my work; all thin, shiny, polyester suits, and all in a range of colors from sunshine yellow to emerald green, glittering powder blue to orange and red plaid. He tucks the cuffs of his pants into his white socks with their thin blue or orange rim lines, above his worn white sneakers.
This week walking back from the dentist I came across a scooter reinvented as a shrine, lined with artificial roses in pinky-orange over an orange and cream checkerboard across the sides, with the front of the scooter bordered in a great rectangle of orange and pink roses around a one foot by two foot portrait of a lady - a picture that looked like a painting, with a dark background and woman's maternal visage perhaps from the fifties.
Splashy, colorful, individualistic pop sentiment like this, crossing cultural borders from around the world, is all the rage in the city the past few years. Sass, humor and creativity are the chic thing of the moment, and it's a pleasing cultural moment.
It's our normal beautiful blue sky red-leaves Indian Summer, the period after the first snow where we catch a few weeks to a month that is as lovely as late Spring, with cool fresh breezes and rustling of small things in the wind.
My husband and I are pleased with the variety of outfits worn by the fellow who catches the bus near my work; all thin, shiny, polyester suits, and all in a range of colors from sunshine yellow to emerald green, glittering powder blue to orange and red plaid. He tucks the cuffs of his pants into his white socks with their thin blue or orange rim lines, above his worn white sneakers.
This week walking back from the dentist I came across a scooter reinvented as a shrine, lined with artificial roses in pinky-orange over an orange and cream checkerboard across the sides, with the front of the scooter bordered in a great rectangle of orange and pink roses around a one foot by two foot portrait of a lady - a picture that looked like a painting, with a dark background and woman's maternal visage perhaps from the fifties.
Splashy, colorful, individualistic pop sentiment like this, crossing cultural borders from around the world, is all the rage in the city the past few years. Sass, humor and creativity are the chic thing of the moment, and it's a pleasing cultural moment.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Interim
In the midst of transition in a number of areas; becoming known for some steampunk jewelry pieces, wrapping up the decade of convention management with a few appearances and some advice to young conventions. I'm finding that while I'm over the worst of convention burnout, I'm not over the deepest of it. I want to be doing new and creative things while at convention, and the return of creativity is a nice thing, allowing me to make a guest appearance at AnimeLA, to discuss a web interview appearance to discuss advice for young con runners, and to try my hand at artist tables at conventions. On the other hand, I'm really over doing menial labor at conventions I love but am not contributing to in a meaningful way. I want to switch departments at the least at all the cons where I've worked for twenty years, and I am cutting my commitments even further than they were originally cut to make time for serious thought about my future and time for my art work. I don't know that the art is where I want to make a lasting mark either; there is pending writing work that has been back-burnered for fifteen years, and I need to sort out how much of it will be biographical, how much will be art, how much will be somewhere in between. I feel like I should write the hero's journey, but having dived and resurfaced numerous times I'm not sure there is a real stopping point to say "here, the journey is done" until I'm dead - at which point it is of course a little late to write. I'm making final decisions about whether to have children, adopt, or go without, and I need to turn some parts of my life inside out and move out the old to make room for the new whatever my ultimate decision. Part of all of this will be returning to this page now the hectic season is done and using the Spring and Summer for writing again. I've signed up for a criminal forensics course at DU starting the end of March and am looking forward to learning new things; something to take on in several areas of my life. More to come!
Friday, July 17, 2009
Style on Colfax
I've loved Colfax for a long time; it's always been a central compass through my life, a main thoroughfare, and also a cobbled-together melting pot of street culture. So I like to keep an eye out for particular examples of Colfax style.
This week, the hubby spotted the fellow on a scooter with full Harley leathers. We spotted a gentleman in his late 50's in the top-down bright blue convertible shouting "Jesus F-ing **#!% %)#&) %)(#%)#(%#)) )((#*#*#%&%" as he took a turn, the gentleman serenading the world with his version of "under my umbrella" (nicely on-key if a little loud) from the bus stop, and the unholy union of a hippie and Dean Martin striding along in tight bell-bottoms, a fitted bright blue lounge jacket with the sleeves pushed up, ponytail, mutton chops, beaded necklaces and a houndstooth-checked Trilby. Since he's a hybrid we've decided he's a "hypie" because it sounds better than "hipbrid."
This week, the hubby spotted the fellow on a scooter with full Harley leathers. We spotted a gentleman in his late 50's in the top-down bright blue convertible shouting "Jesus F-ing **#!% %)#&) %)(#%)#(%#)) )((#*#*#%&%" as he took a turn, the gentleman serenading the world with his version of "under my umbrella" (nicely on-key if a little loud) from the bus stop, and the unholy union of a hippie and Dean Martin striding along in tight bell-bottoms, a fitted bright blue lounge jacket with the sleeves pushed up, ponytail, mutton chops, beaded necklaces and a houndstooth-checked Trilby. Since he's a hybrid we've decided he's a "hypie" because it sounds better than "hipbrid."
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Wildlife in the City
Every now and then it gets a little tiring that the neighbor's backyard barbeque at midnight on a weekday is twenty feet from my bedroom window. On days where the people make me crazy, the wildlife in the area helps to keep me on an even keel.
This morning was the regular bus routine, but stopping to smile at a baby chickadee - fully fledged, but still about an ounce lighter than all the massive three-ounce adults - doing its best to carry away a cookie from the bus stop. Nervous, tentative hops toward it in case the giants sitting on the bench were to attack, then a comical effort with neck craned backward to wobble away with a piece of cookie as big as the bird. Bird got the cookie, bench cheers!
In the park, we have obvious geese, goslings of all sizes, herons, loons, rabbits (though fewer now than before the plague purge a year ago), larks and ducks. The larks are to be found in many traffic crossings near water, since it seems like a good place for insects to congregate in the heat, swooping in daredevil arcs through the traffic pattern and coming up with bugs in reward of their aerial antics. The ones in traffic in slower areas swoop almost lazily. Aurora larks are slow enough to follow easily in their flight paths. Larks at Colfax and Colorado zip through traffic at high speed. The ones living under the gazebo in city park are far too fast to capture with my amateur camera. They flit in under the gazebo at such speeds that I wonder if they don't sometimes bounce off the back wall.
Red tailed hawks and owls have taken pigeons from our roof (and welcome to them, we have spares). Of course there are crows, ravens, sparrows, red-winged blackbirds, woodpeckers (one determined to get into the side of my house or the side of my lamppost), starlings. We have none of the swift little lizards that pop up in dryer and lower locales, but there are foxes in the park, and our neighbor has spotted one on the roof of our garage. We have raccoons, one of which took up residence under our back porch at one point, one of which startled me with a head the size of a football peeping up out of a storm drain. The raccoons are surely pilfering the trash. I'm amazed the foxes find enough to live on here downtown, and amazed at how well they normally hide. Laying out on the back deck one night netted sightings of at least three different types of bats, one of whom found its way under my old refrigerator in the kitchen as well.
The insect life is diverse enough to offer entertainment as well, from the lovely fat monarch caterpillar I found munching the onion stalks (leading to a butterfly with the worst breath in the world) to weird spiky ladybug larvae, darting dragonflies unable to handle a curve so they carve insanely angular paths over the back yard in Summer, and one dragonfly as fat and long as my index finger, bright green with an eight-inch transparent wingspan and looking like something out of the Cambrian, sitting on the sidewalk one day on my way to work. I was tempted to take it along if it were dead but know they can sit quietly waiting for prey, so figured I didn't need to lose a finger to the dinosaur bug by taking that chance. One of the prettiest pictures from my yard was a white spider as fat as the full moon weaving a web laced with raindrops in the middle of a thicket of tall grass, the brightest thing in a blue-grey day of rain. The neighbors, truly thoughtful as they more usually are, have taken to mowing this patch of grass for us, so I'm thinking of putting up a fence in defense of moonlight and ladybugs.
This morning was the regular bus routine, but stopping to smile at a baby chickadee - fully fledged, but still about an ounce lighter than all the massive three-ounce adults - doing its best to carry away a cookie from the bus stop. Nervous, tentative hops toward it in case the giants sitting on the bench were to attack, then a comical effort with neck craned backward to wobble away with a piece of cookie as big as the bird. Bird got the cookie, bench cheers!
In the park, we have obvious geese, goslings of all sizes, herons, loons, rabbits (though fewer now than before the plague purge a year ago), larks and ducks. The larks are to be found in many traffic crossings near water, since it seems like a good place for insects to congregate in the heat, swooping in daredevil arcs through the traffic pattern and coming up with bugs in reward of their aerial antics. The ones in traffic in slower areas swoop almost lazily. Aurora larks are slow enough to follow easily in their flight paths. Larks at Colfax and Colorado zip through traffic at high speed. The ones living under the gazebo in city park are far too fast to capture with my amateur camera. They flit in under the gazebo at such speeds that I wonder if they don't sometimes bounce off the back wall.
Red tailed hawks and owls have taken pigeons from our roof (and welcome to them, we have spares). Of course there are crows, ravens, sparrows, red-winged blackbirds, woodpeckers (one determined to get into the side of my house or the side of my lamppost), starlings. We have none of the swift little lizards that pop up in dryer and lower locales, but there are foxes in the park, and our neighbor has spotted one on the roof of our garage. We have raccoons, one of which took up residence under our back porch at one point, one of which startled me with a head the size of a football peeping up out of a storm drain. The raccoons are surely pilfering the trash. I'm amazed the foxes find enough to live on here downtown, and amazed at how well they normally hide. Laying out on the back deck one night netted sightings of at least three different types of bats, one of whom found its way under my old refrigerator in the kitchen as well.
The insect life is diverse enough to offer entertainment as well, from the lovely fat monarch caterpillar I found munching the onion stalks (leading to a butterfly with the worst breath in the world) to weird spiky ladybug larvae, darting dragonflies unable to handle a curve so they carve insanely angular paths over the back yard in Summer, and one dragonfly as fat and long as my index finger, bright green with an eight-inch transparent wingspan and looking like something out of the Cambrian, sitting on the sidewalk one day on my way to work. I was tempted to take it along if it were dead but know they can sit quietly waiting for prey, so figured I didn't need to lose a finger to the dinosaur bug by taking that chance. One of the prettiest pictures from my yard was a white spider as fat as the full moon weaving a web laced with raindrops in the middle of a thicket of tall grass, the brightest thing in a blue-grey day of rain. The neighbors, truly thoughtful as they more usually are, have taken to mowing this patch of grass for us, so I'm thinking of putting up a fence in defense of moonlight and ladybugs.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Springtime in the Rockies
My neighbor is out mowing his lawn. He happens to be a big smexy Gothic Bouncer, tats and muscles and all, so you would think this would be a sexy thing.
However, aside from his growing bald spot being visible from above, he's hunched over a tiny hand-pushed mower in a navy wifebeater, with tiny thin-rimmed silver glasses and the last three quarters of an inch of a cigarette (one filter, two millimeters remaining of tobacco) clenched grimly between his cynical lips. He reminds me that it is not possible for a Goth to mow a lawn without coming out looking like a cross between Hunter Thompson and Spider Jerusalem.
A little further down the way is Colfax, already beginning to yield spring bounty. This is the same street where I've seen three multi-hundred pound sisters in tank tops and short shorts pile out of a pickup truck carrying a tuba (the sisters, not the truck), an elegant African-American lady with red lips, heels and nails in a cheetah-print cat suit pushing a pram with a baby in a matching cheetah outfit, and of course the tutu skater stopping traffic with his glissando gliding across the street.
So this year I have an eye out as usual for the carnival, and have seen the occasional blue mohawk or ladybug-spotted business suit. Best one this month was a fellow who looked remarkably like Hugh Jackman putting along on a bright orange scooter, and the red-and-white striped tights, polka-dot top, close-cropped yellow hair and long Grover-blue scarf of the lady who looked after him and fanned herself dramatically, eyebrows raised high as she slinkily lurched down the street with the careful heel to toe gait of a heron.
I love this season.
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