Musings

Hoy: caliente y húmeda incluso antes de las 8 de la mañana.

And we’re getting the third overhead rain cell right NOW, for an extra boost of humidity! Oh, yay!

Posted at 7:12 PM | Comments Off on My life in Spanish

Almost everything that catches my eye when I’m out “taking my exercise” is what you’d expect…sidewalks and streets, traffic, parked vehicles, road signs, mailboxes, plants and lawns, dog-walkers, joggers, kid’s toys, puddles, organic matter that the rain last night downed, wandering cats, stray chipmunks, assorted flags—all that you’d expect in a neighborhood-with-a-small-business-area. Special today: garbage containers.

This I didn’t anticipate: juse…written in white paint on an industrial electrical conduit box. Still trying to decode “juse.”

Posted at 6:57 PM | 1 Comment »

I checked my fave weather app at 7am (ish) and it said to expect rain (and lightning) by 11am. I checked later, and it indicated not until 1pm. It was 11:20 by the time I hit the street and…looking up, hmm, weather-y, but not so bad. Then, a few drops. I wisely had stayed close enough to the house that I looped myself in the back door and acquired a big umbrella, thanks to a hand-off from the Guru.

Twenty minutes later, I figured I was in the clear, but within two more minutes, the drizzle was kicking in. Mr. Personal-Putting-Green (see entry perhaps a month ago) had his flag out. In the rain. Got my blood pressure up. I took a photo and kept going.

Of course, by the time I was in the final stretch the weather had clinched the deal and I was super-glad I had the umbrella. Or my walk would have been gloobered up. (See Kayakwoman for this vocabulary.)

Posted at 7:41 PM | Comments Off on In which I became glooberificated

Growing up a few miles from Oldsmobile central, and several counties away from Ford central (and others), car talk, uncapitalized, was almost as frequent a topic as the weather. I remember hearing four-door and two-door much more commonly than their equivalents, sedan and coupe. The latter sound waaaay too “uptown” and worldly for my neighborhood.

This lot used to be full of shade-making vegetation. I miss it. If the doors are from the house or the pool-house, why are they on the sidewalk?

Posted at 9:06 PM | Comments Off on Four-door

Bench for the tired. Or tired bench.

Legal limit. Boundary issue.

A rose is a rose….

Posted at 6:32 PM | 3 Comments »

So much rain that spring petals washed downstream….

Around the corner: wisteria!

Later I found this delicate iris—shape contrasts to the usual bulkier ones….

Of course, that title phrase is not original…just saying I find flowers relaxing, which is meditative (literal meaning of the Japanese word).

Posted at 7:25 PM | Comments Off on Moment of zen

Bark. Crepe myrtle, I think (wait! I know this! Spacey brain right at the moment). Rotated 90° because I thought it would look better in this presentation; maybe it just looks strange.

Nandina berries, portrait mode.

Daffy trio, portraited. [Tentatively voting for making “portrait” a verb.]

Posted at 7:48 PM | Comments Off on Fun with photography

Bigger than a golf ball, smaller than a tennis ball, was this globe of flowers. I don’t recognize it and will watch it over the next few days to see if it turns into something I do recognize.

Nordic bird. Glass I think. Certainly soaring.

Nordic boat. Couldn’t help but think about roiling waters and nasty winds. Brrrrr and perhaps upset stomach, methinks.

Both are Nordic because we saw them in the Nordic museum. Enlightening. Very well done, I thought. The last “ethnic” museum I remember visiting was…something about the combined ancestry of the peoples of the Hill Country in Texas today. Wide-open ethnicities and origin places, not just Finland, Greenland, Iceland, and others with Modern Country names you’d expect. And smaller places like the Åland Islands, an archipelago I had to mention because of the “Å.*” Baltic Sea not Atlantic.

After the museum we stopped in a consignment gear shop with entertainment…climbing and skiing mostly, but also ice climbing. Nothing in the water or with skates that I noticed. After we left, BroMine noted they had two seasons, so I guess I was seeing the winter stuff; summer gear selections may well include snorkeling and scuba diving. Saw a foldable, extremely light food service set for campers and hikers that seemed interesting and more complicated than I expected…rather like origami.

* For the curious and less-informed, that topknot element on the Å is called an overring (note to autocorrect: do not change to overhang). In the past the sound(s) it represents were denoted with a double a (aa) or an acute accented a, á. End of lesson.

Posted at 10:58 PM | Comments Off on Åh, so

A new crop of yellow jasmine blooms….

A computational façade….

Posted at 7:01 PM | Comments Off on Without and with cedilla/cédille

Not sure what to lead with…I choose the seasonal, emotional, and possibly artistic image. Ghoul I thought, rather than ghost. Not sure why. “Ghoul” is from a late 1700s Arabic word for “to seize” that shifted meaning a bit to refer to a desert demon/monster that desecrates graves to eat corpses. That’s specificity; a ghoul is no city-critter.

Now, switch to the merely mildly mysterious. I cannot figure out for sure how this feather got so deeply embedded in the azalea foliage. Wind?

Posted at 6:26 PM | Comments Off on Minor mysteries