Even More Sh*t My Brother Has Been Dragging Home On a Semi-Regular Basis

I don't know where he's been finding this supply, but my brother, in his continuing kleptomania, has now brought home, in several loads over the course of the summer, a couple dozen or so large wood frames. I didn't realize how many he had until we spent Labor Day clearing the underbrush out of a corner of the yard and uncovered a stash.

They're rectangular, about 2.5 x 4 feet, built of rough 2 x 8 boards held together by a metal band. Stacked three or four high they look as if they could be made into raised beds for container gardening except who knows what the wood may have been treated with. They are now strategically hidden in piles in various obscure corners of the property where city code enforcement is unlikely to spot them.

There are another half dozen in the bed of his pickup truck.

My brother says he's holding them for a friend to burn sometime this fall. Makes as much sense as anything else.

Ours are redder and darker than these.

Last week he showed up with two bunches of red bananas, still on the stalks, which he left in the driveway. No idea where he found/stole/was given them.

One bunch is still out there, the squirrels having claimed it. The smaller bunch, with a half dozen bananas, made it inside. They're dark red, the color of old blood, thick and stubby with a tough skin. And delicious. Dense and chewy and very sweet with a slight citrusy taste, exactly how bananas tasted when I was a child and don't anymore.

Now I wonder if we could plant the survivors from the squirrels' bunch.

Suburban Zooarcheology

I came home yesterday evening to find my brother had lopped off more than a dozen fronds from the pineapple palm out front. It is now possible for a full-size adult human to walk around the tree without ducking. (He did a similar chop job with the orange tree by the driveway last week that went even further. I'm not sure whether he got carried away with the pruning or he was cutting it down and just stopped part way through. See: Redneck Studies: The 70% Complete Solution.)

There's a good view of those nasty spikes

I discovered two things as I gathered up the fronds and placed them by the side of the road for trash pick up.*

First: Pineapple palm fronds have long, thin, spiky and incredibly sharp stiletto-like leaves at their base which are quite capable of stabbing one in the hand, thigh, calf or anywhere else that gets too close and they will draw blood.

Second (and less painful but much more interesting): A 'possum up and died under the pineapple palm. I found parts of its disarticulated skeleton pressed into the ground. I have the skull, both halves of the mandible, both femurs, and several vertabrae (probably lumbar, but I can't be sure without others to compare them with). No ribs, no tail bones, no other leg or foot bones although I may just have missed them since they would be very small and it was getting dark.

The bones I do have are in perfect condition. No breakage, no scratches, no teeth missing. And clean. The animal must have died a while ago because there was no soft matter anywhere. (There was the very faintest odor which was sufficient to intrigue Paribanour when I went inside and presented my hands to her but it was faint enough that the other cats were totally uninterested.) skullsunlimited.com is asking $50 for just a skull (of course) and mine is every bit as good and I have the other bits, too.

These are from washington.edu and not mine, but mine look just like this

They're all laid out right now on a fertilizer bag by the front door until I can find a proper way to display them. Some sort of shadow box or something. In the meantime, I'll go back out under the tree and see if I can find any more pieces.

UPDATE: I went back out last evening while it was still light and found the pelvis, more long bones (not sure which), some more vertabrae including tail bones, and several ribs. Still haven't seen any of the very small foot bones.

* We get three trucks coming through on trash day. One automated truck for recyclables in their designated container, another automated truck for non-recyclables in their separate container, and one truck with humans attached picking up "yard waste," basically anything plantish larger than lawn clippings that used to be growing on the property.

Over 200 Served, Not Counting the Cops

Last night began with my brother cursing (one of his favorite pastimes) and vowing never to honor this holiday again (totally not to be taken seriously) because the wind kept threatening to blow over the balloons and even the zombies, and the blower motors inflating the balloons were worn out and there were no viable batteries to power the zombies' eyes and moans, pretty much all of which was true but irrelevant since the real problem was that, as usual, he left everything to the last minute, didn't do any pre-installation checking (re: batteries and motors) and, even on the morning of the day, wasted an hour or two (I wasn't home at the time) chopping down a bougainvillea that was encroaching on the lanai--and had been for several years so why it had to come down right then who knows.

There's no point engaging him when he gets like this so I just let him run his course and assumed the wind would die down once the sun set (it did) and the motors would be more effective when the air cooled (they were). The battery problem was solved when he ran off to the store as the first kids were arriving and bought a jumbo pack of AAs. 

Meanwhile the pillaging hordes started to trickle in about 4:30. Our first visitor, a teenage female pirate, was followed by a five-year-old female doctor. I was kind of disappointed that a lot of kids really didn't seem to put much effort into their "costumes" although the first pirate was very good and there were a number of passable ghouls, super heroes (both male and female) and even a couple of classic Ghostbusters. A couple of kids had corrugated cartons on their heads and I assumed they were Box Trolls but, when I said that to one she sounded very disappointed and sighed, "No, I'm a robot," and turned on the flashing rotating lights in her eye and mouth spaces. I think I might have gotten that correct if they'd been on to start with. The most original was a five- or six-year-old orange Crayola crayon. Second place went to a perfect little Beetlejuice being wheeled around in his stroller.

There were three distinct waves of foragers, the first starting just after sunset, the last coming through just as the police arrive around 9:10.

Did I mention that the police shut us down?

One patrol car went by very slowly on the main street early on in the evening but didn't stop. A second one came onto our street and parked just up from the main activity about 8:30 or so but that's way too early to enforce any sort of noise ordinance and we weren't that loud anyway so he left.

We can't be sure a complaint was filed since people were parking in the main road's median strip as well as on the shoulders in order to get into our street and the police may have been responding to the congestion. Comparing the ethnic diversity of our visitors with the homogeneity Neighbor Dan (who, it must be admitted had partaken of a number of shots) was not taking any chances and attempted preemptive revenge on the mean old man down the street who always complains about everything to the point of calling the police and filing reports about car horns, lawn mowing and unregistered vehicles, by taking a visiting German shepherd named Diesel for a walk and encouraging him to poop on said neighbor's lawn. Diesel was uncooperative.

Finally, three patrol cars came back around 9:20 and stayed until everything completely wound down about forty minutes later which it totally would have done anyway since we were running out of candy and the third wave was thinning out. They didn't say anything to anyone as far as I could tell but their presence was a big hint. Plus, the night was crystal clear and the temperature had dropped into the mid-60s which is a little cool for short-sleeves around here. We put the zombies safely away in the garage, my brother deflated the balloons and I went in to make a cup of hot tea.

My brother's mood had been steadily improving throughout the evening (as I knew it would) and now, operating on the theory that any party shut down by the police is by definition a success, he was delighted. By my calculations we served just north of 220 trick-or-treaters. I managed to salvage three 100 Grand bars for myself and my brother gave me two Almond Joys he acquired somewhere.

This morning is bright and sunny but the wind is howling again.

Balloons Are Up. Dead To Follow

Our Hallowe'en decorations are finally up.

Almost.

The balloons are emplaced and, except for the ones over on the far side of the driveway (which include the headless horseman and the hearse), inflated. We have a couple of new ones including a large orange and black spider with glowing swirly lights in its abdomen. Neighbor Dan has a similar one but its abdomen is white and the swirly lights are multi-colored. I like ours better.

Neighbor Dan has had his decorations up since the first week of October. My brother intended to put ours up shortly after he saw Neighbor Dan's yard but his truck broke (again) that weekend so he couldn't retrieve anything from storage and then his truck was stolen so he mowed the lawn instead which was necessary but insufficient as this is the time of year when the grass shoots up about a foot over night and sets its seeds. Its all getting a bit raggedy already. He finally got around to placing balloons a few days ago.

Our yard still looks sparse compared to Neighbor Dan's but that's mostly because a lot of our decorations are not inflatables: the zombie wedding party, tombstones, dancing skeletons, etc. that really shouldn't be put out too far in advance although there's hardly any chance of rain anymore. Even the TV weather people have officially announced the end of Rainy Season. The days have been glorious, warm and sunny; the nights clear, cool and dry.

We have a couple new zombies, too. Actually, three, I think, plus the dog skeleton. They're the top-half-of-the-body-bursting-through-the-ground type zombies and will go well with the tombstones. One of them arrived broken and when my brother called the company they said they'd received a number of complaints about that one and they would refund his money and he could just go ahead and keep it anyway. That's the way to ensure customer loyalty. The skeleton dog is poseable and is currently leashed to the picket fence along the walkway to our front door. I don't understand how a skeleton can have ears and a nose, but otherwise he's kinda cute.

People have been driving by to check out the neighborhood prior to the pillaging spree this Friday. They seem to be impressed, if they are new to the area, or, if not, satisfied the tradition continues.

Oh, and I voted for the fourth time this year, not that it'll do any good in this district. Maybe in the statewide races.

One of the Inmates May Be Making A Break For It

Neighbor Mike may be serious about moving.

First he had someone come in and officially delineate the property line between him and us. Shortly after that a family with a young daughter was wandering through his back yard. Last week a fat old beagle, answering to the name "Jersey," came snuffling around our lanai and two gentlemen I have never seen before came from behind Mike's house, apologized, and guided him back to their side. I suspect the parties in both instances may have been potential marks casing the joint.

This weekend there were a number of vehicles parked in Mike's driveway and along the side of the road in front of his place. Either they were friends/relatives there for an impromptu (and very quiet) daytime party, or he was holding some sort of garage sale to unload stuff he has no intention of packing when he goes.

He's being very discreet. There is no Sale sign in front of his place. So, no gawkers. Interested parties only, and through an agent.

I have noticed a number of new For Sale signs popping up around town in front of houses that are obviously occupied and well-tended so, apparently, the market is finally coming back up pretty near the lip of the crater that was the aftermath of the 2008 crash.

Who wants to be our neighbor? Can we get you to mow our side of the line, like Mike did? (Bonus: He tended to use our mower which he often borrowed without asking. We took his ladders. We're all kind of a commune that way.)

Fer Mowin' or Fer Ownin'?

Which is the punchline to an Old New England Farmer joke: A guy moves up from the big city and buys a smallish farm next door to a native New Englander. While inspecting his purchase he notices that there are no boundary markers and the fields just sort of merge into each other. He approaches the old farmer and asks, "Say, neighbor, can you tell me where my property ends and yours begins?" The farmer thinks on it for a moment and responds, asking, "Depends. . . . (see headline, above).

It's one of the reasons Robert Frost thought good walls made good neighbors. There is no wall between our place and Neighbor Mike's.

Which is not any kind of issue, except that Neighbor Mike has apparently thought recently of selling and, as part of the plan, called in someone to examine his place and his title to it and that person discovered that Mike has been mowing a strip of our property almost from the very beginning. As a matter of fact, at least one of Mike's irrigation sprinkler heads is buried a couple of feet over on our side of the line.

My brother discovered this a few days ago when he went looking for a place to plant the pecan tree (potentially awesome present) he received for Christmas. (Actually,what he got for Christmas was a picture of a pecan tree, but the actual stick finally showed up courtesy of UPS.) He noticed a string running parallel to what he thought was our property line and followed it to little flags staked out to the front and back of the territory. Mike confirmed that the survey says everything to the east of the string is actually ours.

It's not much. A few hundred square feet at most. Despite nobody knowing where the real line was, and despite Mike mowing it, he has not, by his actions, claimed it and we have not alienated it.  And now we all know, so it stays ours.

Although we have to admit: Mike did a good job caring for it.

Infills, Outtakes and a Successful Tantrum

They laid in the metal guide rails for the sidewalk concrete this morning.

They started to do it yesterday but my brother chased them away (I was out at the time) when they called in a private tree trimming service (which contracts to the city) to butcher the live oak. Despite being able to run the loader/grader last week without any interference from the tree, somebody decided it was suddenly in the way and ordered it cut back. The ASPLUNDH clowns managed to take one major branch down before my brother knew they were there. They cut it off a good 20 feet back from the path of the proposed sidewalk and were getting ready to hack off another, higher, one (and therefore less in the way, even theoretically) when he stopped them.

They claimed they had to cut it back to the power pole line but had no answer when my brother demanded to know why they hadn't, therefor, touched the palm tree that fairly abuts the sidewalk right-of-way. He told them they were full of shit and that he was going to file a complaint. All of them, tree butchers and sidewalk layers alike, were packed up and gone in the time it took him to go into the house, get his phone and come back outside.

This morning, 7 a.m., the sidewalk guys were back, laying out the guide rails, snapping them together end-to-end, spiking them into place and leveling them. And very carefully not stepping off the right-of-way onto our property.

When they were done, a guy with a mini-front loader came down and began hauling dirt from a pile they had deposited in the vacant field across the street. The rigid and straightened rails didn't always touch the ground and there were gaps and low points all along the way that needed to be topped up or else the concrete would (slowly) flow all over the place. It took about ten trips and, for the record, the loader never left the street pavement, except for one pass, after all the dirt was deposited, in order to level out the fill inside the rails. It looks nice.

We sincerely hope this bunch passes on the warning to the crew that comes next to pour the concrete.

Meanwhile, they've moved across our road and started to scrape Neighbor Mike's place.

Messing With the Hydrological Constant

We just lost the moat on the east side.

Instead of trenching the area scraped earlier this week, a guy with a combination front loader/back grader dumped large piles of dirt over the grassless swath and proceeded to push at around for two hours this morning effectively filling in and leveling our swale.

Of course, since that side of the road had been a 10-15 degree slope before, it was obvious it would have to be either leveled up or down before any sidewalk could go in, but I wonder what this infill is going to do to our run-off during the rainy season. The house is on a slight rise and we have no basement/cellar so I can't imagine anything disastrous, but I can foresee large areas of long-term squishyness below the live oak making it difficult to mow during the half year when mowing is necessary. Either that or everything will flow into the southside moat which already backs up by the driveway because the town stopped its swale clearing and enhancement program at the edge of our property last year. (Neighbor Mike's ditch was cleared and deepened as was everyone else's down that way toward the canal. We don't know why they stopped short of us.)

Now that the planned path has been brought up to street level and graded, there's still a slight bit of trenching to do. The directional guide forms are in place right up to the north edge of our property although the cross forms are not, yet, and they appear to be lower than the new ground level built today.

The loader driver is still the first, and only, worker I've seen so far. I went outside to see the results of his labors and we waved to each other. Nothing (except the sawhorses) has yet crossed the street onto Neighbor Dan's place.

The Great Leap Forward

Boy, howdy, was I sure wrong about that!

Our sidewalk construction took a quantum leap forward this week. The warning sawhorses suddenly appeared all the way down the road past us just before the weekend, although I still couldn't see any other signs of actual work on the horizon. Someone did stack a load of paving tiles by a driveway made of paving tiles (again, also past our street) in preparation for altering that home's access approach. But that was it.

Today, I woke up to find the verge along our property already scraped. The scraping does not yet cross the street onto Neighbor Dan's property and should not be confused with either the leveling necessary or the trench that will hold the concrete forms. This is just a ripping of the sod in anticipation of leveling and trenching and is necessary because the crab grass and Mexican clover, among other things, form long, tough tendrils that snake across the ground. That's a strip we'll never have to mow again, although we'll have to see how much green they leave on the street side of the sidewalk. And it looks as if they're going to be able to work around the pineapple palm at the corner of our property. (For some strange reason, there is a pineapple palm almost exactly at each of the corners of our territory and, yet, no one has ever admitted to planting any of them.)

At least some of the machinery has moved in, as well. I'm not sure what they used for a scraper since it was all done before 8 a.m. and I neither saw nor heard them while they were at it. There's a backhoe just up the road, now, but that may be the trencher and, in any event, has not been used since I've been watching. There are also a couple of pieces of heavy equipment parked in the open field across the road. I can see personal trucks used by the workers to get to and from the job site parked in the median way back up the road but no people are in evidence anywhere.

It's amazing how much can get done with nobody around.

Miscellanea, Garden Variety

My brother brought home a huge semi-ripe papaya yesterday. It was a gift. It's sitting on the kitchen counter on the theory and expectation that it, like mangoes, will continue to ripen on its own. When he deems it ready, he intends to plant the seeds. I have no idea what his criteria are, but if he manages it, we'll have fresh papaya.

Meanwhile, our inconsistent lawn mowing has paid off in the sprouting of three new mango trees. Unfortunately, they are either directly under the current mango or off in the property line and need to be transplanted. Neighbor Mike, who ran out and bought his own mango based on how good ours taste only to discover he had gotten a different, and not nearly as sweet, species, has already claimed one sapling. My brother intends to give one of the others away. The third will be transplanted to an appropriate spot.

Meanwhile, the coconut palm has had a good year. A full dozen and a half have dropped so far with at least that many more still tucked up under the fronds. Of those that have fallen maybe seven are basically dead. Most of the rest slosh when shaken, meaning they are full of milk, and will be harvested for both milk and meat as soon as I can find where my brother hid the machete. The remaining two have sprouted. One will be planted as soon as we can find an open space far enough away from power lines so the electric crews wont feel threatened and trim it to death. The other will be given away.

The orange tree has grown at least a foot since planting and its top has opened up. My brother continues to feed and water it.

The last of the cherry tomatoes and sweet peppers are long gone. The banana tree is still in its tub and needs to be planted.

If we ever decide to go full Fruitarian, we could be pretty well self-sufficient. (Ain't gonna happen. My brother's a full-bore carnivore and I'll never survive without bacon.)

The Frightful Day Approacheth

The local newspaper has officially announced that Rainy Season ended last Wednesday. They may be right. We haven't had a drop of rain since then and hardly a cloud in the sky.

Let the games begin.

Neighbor Dan took an early lead by laying out several of his inflatable Hallowe'en displays over the weekend but he has yet to inflate them. I suppose he's just positioning to get a feel for balance and composition but he has also not mowed his lawn in over a week and his grass is already shoe-top high and raggedy. If he leaves the displays staked as is he won't be able to cut and will be close to knee deep by the time the big evening rolls around.

My brother, on the other hand, mowed yesterday afternoon. At least, he mowed the front lawn which, after all, is where the decorations go and the only part visitors will see. Actually, in best Redneck fashion, he mowed most of the front lawn, ignoring under the live oak and bougainvillea and around the coconut palm on the logical assumption that neither decorations nor visitors will go there and it will be dark anyway, after all, so who's going to notice.

I've only seen one other house with any decorations and they've been up since late September but the house is nowhere near us and their display consists entirely of smallish inflatable Disney characters leaning heavily on the theme of Mickey as Sorcerer's Apprentice. Not even also rans.

That Time of Year

Well, we're finally recovered (mostly) from our Labor Day bacchanal.

My brother managed to get the lawn mowed and the bunting up along the fence by the path to the front door but the rain threatened and although it never did pour like it has every other day for the last two weeks, we wimped out and ate indoors.

I barbecued way too many ribs on the assumption my brother's new girl friend would be joining us which she didn't because she had apparently already made a commitment to her own kids' picnic (which was just as well because we didn't have enough corn on the cob, otherwise) so he and I ended up with basically a rack and a half each and, although we had left overs of the chips and dip and beans and potato salad and Cole slaw, we killed those ribs. (I suspect there may have been some Valium in the sauce because my brother collapsed and slept for six straight hours right afterward.)

So now Summer is unofficially over and Rainy Season is almost over and mango season is definitely over although its going to be next mango season before we manage to eat up all this year's harvest. What's next? Oh, look!

Catalogs.

Deconstructing The Old Year

Our nephews came down for the New Year celebrations. They were down here to party with friends so, technically, they just used our house as a base of operations but they did visit for a while when their sister and mom returned from Georgia and they also helped tear up the back yard which was a good thing.

My brother has long wanted to remove the small mound out back that Dad built years ago. It originally contained a rock garden and a small working waterfall feeding a stream that emptied into a koi pond. The mound was built on a base consisting of the excavated dirt from the pond. On top of that, Dad stacked a short ton of coral boulders glued together with cement. The watercourse from the fall to the pond was lined with river stones embedded in cement. The pond was a homemade basin of cement over a sheet of black waterproof plastic liner and edged with slate cemented into place. Dad was a frustrated landscape architect and concrete was his medium.

The overall effect was very pleasant for several years but, eventually, the underlying earth sank a bit and the water didn't flow properly and the pump stopped and the whole thing was too tightly cemented together for the operating guts to be accessible to repair and so it became simply a pond with a slight rise in the background. The folks added and aerator to the pond and the fish were happy.

The fish were happy for a while, anyway. I was on the phone with Mom one day when she suddenly exclaimed, "Oh, look at the great blue heron!" which, of course, being on the phone from Connecticut, I could not, but she described in detail how it had just landed in the pond. Her excitement was understandable. Great blue herons are magnificent birds and not that common, even down here, are usually spotted at long range off in a swamp somewhere, and to have one standing not more than 20 feet from the back door was extraordinary. It was only after the great blue had flown that Mom realized the visit might have been somewhat less than exceptional and that, in fact, they had invited the heron by setting out such an easily accessible goldfish buffet. A few of the smaller fish survived by hiding under the leaves overhanging the edge of the pond but they were too traumatized to ever come out of the shadows again.

Dad died and the pond and mound became overgrown. The last of the fish were eaten by some other bird (no witnesses this time) and the water was allowed to evaporate. My brother didn't make any changes while Mom was alive because she liked some of the flowers that took root there.

That all changed this past weekend. The nephews gave my brother a new sledge hammer and chain saw for Christmas. I gave him a new orange tree. On New Year's Eve day we all went out and started dismantling the pond with the sledgehammer (my brother initially claimed he didn't need a new one so the boys started off with the old one but it broke about ten minutes in (Dad always made bunker-grade concrete.)) and the overgrowth with the chain saw.

The nephews have now gone back to base. The project's not done yet. The walls of the pond are completely broken up and it is about two-thirds filled in with rubble and dirt. The mound is half gone. We will have extra volume remaining thanks to the cement fill. The coral boulders have been rolled back to the property line in preparation for we know-not-what further use. The trees and bushes are down (with the exception of the central trunk of the tree on which the mockingbirds built their nest last summer where its ruins still perch) and the branches hauled out front for disposal.

The area looks disturbingly like a mass grave. Sod or grass seed will take care of that. What's worse, we can now see the neighbors.

All Things Considered, That Went Well

We survived the looting and pillaging mini-hordes. It took ten bags of candy to do it, but we didn't run out and actually have a few pieces left over for ourselves, like we need them.

Earlier in the day I came home to find my brother upset because he'd decided to frost the skeleton cakes with a glaze, apparently not realizing just how runny that would be (why not I don't know, it's not like he's never seen a glazed cake before), and ended up with two skulls that looked as if they'd been used for candle holders with wax dripping all down the sides. I liked the effect, but he didn't.

Later, he tried making a "fire" pit using colored streamers blown upward by a fan but, after a couple of hours constructing the thing, the fan he had wasn't strong enough to move anything so he went out but couldn't find a single window fan at WalMart (!) and finally purchased one at Lowe's which didn't have enough power, either, so the whole project went south. He took it surprisingly well, which is not his normal M.O.

The actual bribing of the monsters started a little late and slow this year but picked up after 8 p.m. and eventually ran long. I especially enjoyed the tiny three-year-old Batman and also the slightly older Batman who, being a little unclear on the concept, upon hearing us yell, "Hey, there's Batman!" lifted his mask and insisted, "No! It's me!" Never seen him before. We had a pair of moving sound-activated ghosts suspended from wires that crisscrossed the driveway moaning and cackling. Some kids were freaked out but the ones I liked were the kids who were so fascinated that they forget all about asking for treats and just stared transfixed as the ghosts floated by overhead.

The police stopped by at the height of the festivities and we were worried either the cars parked up and down the median strip of the main road were causing a hazard or the neighborhood curmudgeon had complained. (He's filed formal complaints at one time or another against every single property owner adjacent to him and a couple of others that aren't.) It turned out to be just a routine patrol and we all carried on.

The weirdest thing I saw all night though were pick-up trucks with flatbed trailers (the kind lawn care companies use to transport mowers) kitted out with chairs and even a porch swing all filled with kids cruising  through looking for likely neighborhoods to loot. Apparently, those trailers are a thing down here.

Making the Best of a Windy Situation

Even though Sandy missed us by about two hundred miles, it's big enough that the backside winds have been blowing steadily for the past four days. And, while they're from the north and dry thus giving us high clear skies and temperate days, they're also strong enough to prevent my brother from putting out any more inflatable Hallowe'en decorations or blowing up the ones that are already on the lawn.

Neighbor Dan has been unable to raise his legions either and his have been staked out since the first of the month which means the grass all around them is now almost two feet tall and what's under them is probably dead.

My brother has been receiving more Hallowe'en stuff than I knew about. There are now four life-size ethereal figures looming around the living room. Three females and one male, all close to six feet tall, with livid hands and faces and draped in linen and gauze. They can't go outside, either, until the calm returns.




We did get to make use of one of his new purchases: a skull shaped (two halves, front and back) cake pan. He brought it out last night and we made up a double batch of pound cake* batter because the skull cavities looked a lot larger than they turned out to be so, after baking, we ended up excising a lot more of the material between the two halves than we had intended in order to get them to fit together properly the result being we have most of a pound cake, in two pieces, left over which is

actually a nice problem to have.

While the width of the skull cake is almost right, especially given the extremely pronounced zygomatics, the parietal is truncated giving it something of a bullet shape when viewed from the side. It remains, nevertheless, delicious.

My brother found some black food coloring when he went out late last night for additional baking supplies, so I am leaving the skull decorating to him.

* Is a double batch of pound cake a kilo cake? Sorry.

And Not a Moment Too Soon

The UPS guy delivered four large boxes of body parts this morning.

I didn't know what they were, of course, when they arrived but they were addressed to my brother so I stacked the cartons in front of the door to his room. He took one look at them, smiled, and said, "Ah! Dead people!"

It seems we will be competing with Neighbor Dan in Hallowe'en excess this year after all. Neighbor Dan's blow-up menagerie of goblins, ghoulies and monsters has been spread across his lawn since the beginning of the month. Several of them are new this year. (The main effect, so far, is that Neighbor Dan has been unable to mow for almost three weeks and it shows.) All we've had to show until now are half a dozen balloon-head ghosts swaying around the live oak, and those only went up two days ago.

The contents of my brother's boxes consist of various zombie bits to be used to create a graveyard uprising.

(What a graveyard uprising might look like.)

My brother has started laying electric cords in preparation for the implantation of the inflatables. We're already stocked up on candy. I predict by the end of this weekend we will be in full holiday battle mode. 

Miscellanea, (Mostly Meteorlogical)

Looks like Rainy Season is finally officially here. Haven't seen the sun since before the transit of Venus which we didn't see either. It rains at least once every day now, sometimes in the morning sometimes in the evening. At least I'm remembering to close up my car. . .and the birdbath is staying full.

Of course, now that it's raining, the grass is greening up and growing fast and the lawn mower is busted again. From the symptoms, I'm thinking the drive belt has irretrievably stretched out of shape.

You know it's humid when the weather report lists the current temperature as 87F "but feels like 100F." For the record, yes, it does.

The most active burrowing owl habitat around this season is on my way to the library. An adult is always perched on one of the little cruciform burrow-marking stakes and usually one or more of the family is on the ground nearby. I went by once and there were four of them on the ground surrounding the one on the perch. There are a number of open lots nearby so this place may have some really easy hunting.

I just heard "Car Talk" will be coming to an end this fall after 25 years. Almost everything I know automotively (which admittedly is not much) I learned from those guys.

Yesterday would've been Mom's 92nd birthday. My brother bought four pints of Ben & Jerry's, two for him and two for me. They were on sale. Happy Birthday! (I'm going to make mine last at least a month.)

Sub-tropical December

I finally found out the name of the small pale purple star-shaped flowers that are growing wild across lawns and highway medians all over town. They're a weed, growing in low mats of hundreds and thousands of blooms as only big as a thumbnail and two inches (at most) tall. They look like nothing so much as a light dusting of snow, the kind of early flurries common up north that occur while the grass is still green.

It's a pusley, of which there are three varieties. The one we have here, I believe, is also known as Mexican clover. They stay low enough that the mowers tend to go over them. Anyway, that's as close to snow as we're going to get. All of our windows are open and the fans are on.

On a semi-related note, the tomatoes look to be producing a very healthy second crop. There are several large fruits ripening even now.

Redneck Studies

I've been studying my brother for some time now and I am beginning to get a handle on the concept of "Redneck" especially the southern variety. For one thing, it's an acquired trait. My brother was born and raised in New England and has lived everywhere from the northern plains to southern California without betraying any such tendencies previously.

One of the primary traits is the habit of trying to come up with original yet ad hoc solutions to common problems, attempting to bypass the ways of the world as it were, without, at the same time, covering all of the possible, and often obvious, consequences.

For example: My brother decided, a couple of years ago when gasoline prices were going through one of their regular and in no way manipulated spikes, to do a little hydrocarbon arbitrage. He bought a number of plastic jerry cans and filled them with regular unleaded in an attempt to lock in the price. The full cans he then stored in the shed out back.

Let's forget the opportunity cost of tying up cash in a volatile commodity.

The redneck point is: The shed is not watertight. Neither are the jerry cans. By the time the price of gas had risen enough for him to feel justified dipping into the strategic reserve, the cans contained probably 98% distilled petroleum and 2% H2O. I had to rescue him more than once before we figured out why his truck kept conking out on him (invariably in the middle of the night).

Although he no longer tops off the truck from the cans neither has he disposed of the contaminated fuel. (Note: Review the concept of sunk costs.) Apparently, a couple of weeks ago he filled the tank of the lawnmower from one of the cans. The lawn is now knee high and the grass is literally going to seed. (The length of time it has taken to fix the mower, this time, is not entirely his fault since Mom put the receiver of the phone in her room (Why does she even have a phone in her room?) down backwards which took the entire house off-line for the weekend (we don't use the land line much) causing the lawnmower repair guys to get a busy signal and delay returning the mower to us.)

The last time the mower needed repair (August) he bitched and moaned for a day and a half about the cost. This time, not a word. Which means he knows it's his fault. The repair guys didn't just find water in the tank. Spiders (more accurately, spider corpses) were clogging up the carburetor, too.