Local animals (2 of 2): Squirrel.

The other week I was packing up from reading on the front porch of the front house, and I see my (wizened) (hippie) neighbor standing in the middle of the street, staring at a squirrel a few feet up the base of this one giant tree.

"It fell out of its nest," she was like. "I hope it's okay."

"Ohhh," I was like, and then I explained that like ten or fifteen minutes earlier I had seen way up in the tree a squirrel and a raven squawking at each other, and the squirrel occasionally chasing the raven, and maybe the squirrel was worried about the raven getting at the baby squirrel.

"Oh, I hope it's okay," she was like. "I don't know what to do."

"It should be okay," I was like.  "It's not a baby baby, it's a little bigger, and it's running up that tree trunk all right."

I was also like, "And, that other squirrel is watching over it, so it should be okay."

"Yes," she was like, "It must be his mom. Or maybe his aunt."

"Ohhh," I was like, mildly sadly. "You know, we really shouldn't project sexist stereotypes onto the animal world."

At that, she looked straight at me.

"I agree," she was like, soberly.

Local animals (1 of 2): Ducks.

A few weeks ago when I was coming home from the pharmacy that's a little bit of a walk from my house, I wandered by the creek-side park that's tucked away on the other side of downtown, and all of a sudden I hear this just frantic high-pitched bird call, and I realize that there's a mother duck by the creek right by the sidewalk, and that I had spooked a duckling and it had run away up the gradually-elevating sidewalk just yards away from its mother, and now it was frightened and couldn't get back to her.

So, I turned around and went up this path on the hillside, and I just stood there and watched.

The duckling kind of ran back and forth against the curb on the sidewalk, but after like a minute, though, it finally went far enough down on its runnings, to get to the point where the sidewalk opened up to the creek and there be reunited with its mother.

They went a few feet to a muddy uprising with some long grass, and the mom sat there and the duckling was there with her, walking around a bit, but otherwise staying very very close to her.

It had only really stopped its peeping when it finally got into the water right next to its mother.

Neighborly interaction.

Like a month ago, I was sitting out on my back patio reading on a quiet afternoon when absolutely nobody was around, and all of a sudden I see this (wizened) (old) (hippie) (white) woman with shoulder-length frizzy curly grey hair and a bandana on slowly wandering up the adjacent driveway, holding out a small plastic container of organic juice.

"Can you help me open this?", she was like, stopping and looking over at me, pleadingly.

"Sure," I was like, setting my book down and going over like fifteen feet to the driveway to meet her.

And, I took some hand sanitizer out of my back pocket, and cleansed my hands before taking the bottle from her.

"Look at you," she observed to herself, as I took out the hand sanitizer.

A moment in the culture wars.

A number of weeks ago at the one retirement village where I now work, this one (scrawny) (older) (white) guy was saying that he was so worried, since guns are starting to be brought into the local high school in town, and his grandchildren go there.

So, I sympathized, and he said he didn't know what was happening, and I said that I'd been reading a lot since I was also concerned about crime being up everywhere, and that whenever gun sales go up, some leach out onto the black market, and there was a lot of guns being sold during the "chaos" when Trump was president (I said that very carefully), and those are now coming out all across the U.S., this one professor who was in the paper's research had said.

"Yeah?", he was like, hardening up suddenly. "I'd like to see what political affiliation that professor has!"

Avocado seed experiment.

For some reason, although it has shitty produce overall, the one grocery store in the college town that I now live in always has good sales on avocados, so I've been finding myself buying a lot of them every now and then, to have on sourdough toast in the morning with slivers of raw onion and a lot of salt.

And, I've been saving the seeds, and I have a couple that I'm trying to sprout in a glass of water, and the rest are just sitting out in this big bowl on my counter.

They were getting kind of dried out and cracked-looking, and one or two of them looked a bit moldy, so I decided to just put them in the soil out by my back patio, and I lovingly set them in this like bare patch of soil by a corner of the front house, where they half-poked out of the ground some, their big bottoms just resting in the earth.

The next day, they were gone, and the soil around there looked suspiciously turned up, and there was like a little fragment of an outer husk like right there, too.

I guess the squirrels got them?

I also guess that avocado seeds aren't poisonous to squirrels, because otherwise I'd have seen them dropping out of the trees.

Boardgame racket.

So, at my local library in the college town that I now live in, you can check out boardgames from the library.

I've been doing that a bit, and then one of them got recalled, and so I had to go and return a boardgame to the library for the first time ever.

The one (placid) (older) (light-skinned) (vaguely bohemian) (black) lady was at the desk, and there was a (younger) (stringy-looking) (stressed out-looking) (white) girl with her, and so I chit-chatted with them a bit about the boardgame system, and they said that people were usually very good, but sometimes stuff did go missing, so that when boardgames get returned, they have to count everything very carefully.

"So what do you do if something is missing?", I was like.

Then, they explained that they see if it affects gameplay, and if they can make something to replace it, or if they have to google the manufacturer and see if you can get replacement pieces, etc.

"Wow," I was like.  "That's a lot of work."

"Yeah," they were like.

"You know," I was like, "If people return them and there's something missing, you could always tell them something like, 'You know, if you give me ten dollars, I won't tell anyone,' and you could get money off of them. I bet you could make a lot of money that way, if you could keep it going for a while."

"I never thought of that," the one (placid) (older) (light-skinned) (vaguely bohemian) (black) lady was like. "But maybe I'd ask for five, ten dollars is too much."

More mysteries of the upstairs neighbors.

The front house in front of the cottage where I now live has a nice covered porch upfront, and I asked the neighbors if I could use it to read, and I do that now sometimes if it's raining out in the afternoons and I can't sit outside in the backyard.

So, the other Sunday afternoon I was doing that, and I hear some people coming down the stairs, and then it's the (longer haired) college kid and some girl, and they kiss on the doorstep, and she leaves, and I say awkwardly hi to her since she has to walk like right by me, and out of the corner of my eye I can see that he's bare-chested with a towel wrapped around his waist.