Road Signs

Shoes and Paint Can

Cats

Hop Hop

I was coming home at night and this guy was hopping up our front door jamb. When he saw me, he froze, just beneath the door bell (which made it really easy to take pictures of him). Frogs are really weird looking. Come to think of it, this guy looks almost exactly like my Alphabet Animals frog. He just needs a little suit.

STOP

I like signage. And I like how in the diagonal late afternoon light, those street signs glow.

Kids Say the Darnedest Things: "Bath Tissue"

While carrying in a giant Costco-purchased package of toilet paper/"bath tissue", June opined:

"Why is it called 'bath tissue'? It should be called, like, 'butt tissue'."

Fair point, though I suspect the marketers might disagree.

Tree House and Jasmine

As mentioned, the jasmine blooms. (This is the front yard jasmine. That was the back yard.) And the tree house has revived. It fell into infrequent usage for a while,¹ but it's back again, and we're making various "refactorings"² and enhancements: removing an awkward section that never quite worked, adding new little nooks and platforms — a richer construct in general. Yay, tree houses! Yay, jasmine!

1 It originally had the traditional boards-nailed-into-trunk ladder, but one day some little neighborhood kids decided the tree house looked fun and scampered up uninvited, and while in theory I'd like to welcome everyone with open arms, I certainly wasn't going to accept the liability for one of them falling out and knocking their head, so I had to take down those boards; and then I made a retractable rope ladder^a that was technically serviceable but was awkward and difficult; but now I devised a new ladder, solid wood, that hooks on, but can be easily removed as needed, making the house once again easily accessible (when and if I choose).

a More specifically, it was a rope ladder with wooden cross-slats. An old drunk, stumbling by while I constructed it in the front yard, informed me that he used that exact kind of ladder back when he worked on ships and that they called it a "Jacob's ladder".

2 As we say in the programming-nerd biz.

Flowers

I've probably said before,¹ I'm particularly fond of the flowers that grow on our empty lots, enduring, adding beauty, in the absence of care. (How did they get there? Were they once planted by a person, when the lot was a home, and now remain long after the house is gone? Or did they find their way on their own? Hmm...)

1 All my posts should be implicitly prefaced with this statement. After nearly ten years running, almost everything I say on this blog has probably been said here before.