A night-time sight the other week:

I sit in my armchair reading with my windows open to let in the cool night air, and on the tree trunk right outside my window right to the left of me that's highlighted by this one intense outside light, I see against the light grey bark a large pale green grasshopper slowly crawling upwards.

An experiment, with gooses.

A few weeks ago I was taking a walk in the one lake park that's kind of near where I live, and as I was walking down this one sidewalk in the meadow, between me and the lake there was a bunch of Canadian geese eating grass.

And, I needed to fart.

So, as an experiment, I decided to try letting out this huge fart but otherwise maintain my same pace walking and otherwise keep everything the same, to see what the geese would do.

And, right away at the sound of the huge fart ripping out they all froze and turned to face me, I could see out of the corner of my eye, and then like one second later, one of them started hissing.

Locals, on guns.

The bartender at the local brewery that I go to said that she's heard a number of people be worked up about guns, locally, and saying they're dialing back when and where they go out.

Over a holiday weekend this summer, there was shots fired on the main strip near campus, and that's got people rattled since stuff like that never used to happen there, it was such a safe area.

Unexpected return.

So, a few weeks ago I hear a familiar truck sound, and later I see the old (motorcycle-riding) (Indian-American) kid's vehicle parked next door again.

So, later when I see him outside, I go and say hi and I ask how his new job in a neighboring state is going, and he says he's back for 12 hours to help clean out the house.

So, I offer for him to finally take the tour of my cottage, and he's down, and and so he puts on a mask and comes over, and I kindly ask him to take off his shoes once he's inside the door.

"Oh I know," he's like, "I'm from an Asian household."

And, he says he's surprised how much space there is compared to how it looks like from the outside, and how it's bigger than some studios that you can get on campus that are a lot more expensive.

I also tell him that there's storage downstairs, which is nice since the closet is small, and he says he noticed that and was wondering.

Later, when I'm out reading on the front porch of the front house, the one upstairs neighbor with longer hair comes back with a few things from a "FREE" table that the neighbors had set outside, including a projector that he notes looks like it came from the local university, "but I'm not asking too many questions."

"I grew up with a hoarder," he was like, "So I have a hard time saying no to stuff like this."

Hand-drawn sign on a futon sitting out by the curb outside the front house...

 ...that the college kids from the upstairs apartment presumably drew:

I need you because 

I am FREE

. . .

Avocado seeds.

The other week, I had around three avocado seeds sitting on my counter, next to the glasses where I have one sprouting and I'm trying to sprout another one, and I decided it was time to get rid of them.

So, in the early afternoon that day, I put them on the top of the wrecked-up plastic table on the brick patio just outside my little cottage.

In the evening they were still there, but by the next morning when I checked, they were gone.

I wonder what animal ate them.

Temporary bower.

After the tree guys took out the one invasive species from the backyard by my cottage, this one long thin branch from the remaining good tree that it had been crowding out was now free, but it lacked support from the invasive tree's branches, and so it just reached out and sagged to the ground like 4-7 feet off the ground in the narrow space between my cottage and the front house.

I kind of liked it because it was almost like a makeshift bower that made you close to leaves, even though the branch was spindly and the leave bunches were sparse and clumpy, and I was even thinking that I could joke about selling naming rights to people -- the "so-and-so memorial bower" or whatever -- but then I came home later that week, and it was gone.

I can only assume that my landlord saw it and ripped it out, or there was complaints from my front neighbor whose apartment exit comes out through the back.

It kind of really was eye-level, and something that you could walk into.