Three neighborhood happenings…

…this spring:

1) Looking out my cottage window, something catches my eye in the yard, and it’s a squirrel turning himself around over and over again in the dust in the bare space beneath the outdoor table that sits out in the middle of the front house’s backyard, and there’s like grooves in the ground there where he’s doing it, perhaps from so many dust-baths, or perhaps from some natural phenomenon conducive to creating grooves in the ground in which a squirrel can take a dust-bath.

2) As I leave the one local brewery with a plate of like three cupcakes left over from a birthday party there, I see from afar some people gathered outside the local music bar to smoke and gather before leaving in a group or whatnot, so I cross the street to go offer food to them, and the group by the curb is like six-to-eight (dressed up for a night out) (college-age) females who are out celebrating one’s twenty-first birthday – “I just had my first legal drink!”, the (white) (blonde) birthday celebrant is like, over-exuberantly – and anyhow they are stoked to take the cupcakes that I offer, and when they ask and I explain to them where they came from, the one (Asian-American) one just smiles and nods her head in satisfaction and is like, “I love that,” and she then explains that they’re all in this environmental-focused major, so it’s great, they all hate food waste, and like two of them who seem decently drunk are already grabbing the cupcakes and unwrapping the paper from around their bases in order to devour them when their Uber arrives, and they continue to do that as they all start stepping into the Uber, like both unwrapping the cupcakes and trying to step into a car at the same time, all while in short skirts and wearing high heels.

3) In the yard of the new-ish neighbors on the corner who turned their backyard into an open-air kennel where they keep up to 3 dogs at a time who are sometimes barking nuisances to the point where I’ve kept records and truthfully reported them to animal control twice over the course of one year for noise violations, there’s now like heavy black plastic tarps covering most of the wire fence, so that the animals cannot easily see passer-bys or other dogs as they pass by, so they bark less.