random thoughts – Day 2,304 (Monday) – reading, walking, and thinking

The weather was cooler today and it was a relief. There were cool breezes flowing into the house. The air and all the backyard trees reminded me of my family’s vacation camping trips in Maine when I was a kid.

Hitting the southern Maine coastal area and living in a cloth house was a change of pace from our life in a proper building. Not completely, though. We sometimes got a site with electricity and I think at least once we brought a portable TV and electric frying pan in addition to the usual outdoor living and cooking gear. I have a memory of sitting outside our tent with a campfire and watching a TV set on the picnic table. Or maybe I dreamt the part about the TV. I’ll need to check with Mom and Sis.

The house held to the pattern of the heat wave. Even with the windows open wide to benefit from the breezes, the house held steady at four to five degrees warmer inside than out.

It was a quiet day, which is the current norm. There was reading on the couch – Mockingjay (the final book of The Hunger Games) was started yesterday and will be done by bedtime tonight. There was cooking and eating. 

Another walk,
another bunny sighting.

During the evening walk, there was the spotting of a brown bunny in a yard and one of the neighborhood outdoor cats in the street. The turkeys are still pretty scarce. The several usual neighborhood cats have been scarce and Mom and I wondered last week if something had happened to them, but the white and tortoise one was out this evening. 

I’ve been noticing people’s plantings, yard décor, and exterior lighting in search of ideas for my own house. Someone one street over has a large planter that I like in the form of a fish on its back with its mouth open to the sky. It reminds me of a much smaller similar matched set I had that I left behind in Tennessee to save space during the move, thinking I could find them again. Not the case. There have been years of regret over my abandoned yard décor which included a bird, two fish, a Buddha head, and a heart. 

Some very poor choices have been made during moves, mostly because I stupidly thought I could replace items as easily as I found them in the big box stores the first time. I even asked AI why yard décor is so frigging ugly and stupid since 2016 or so and got a very long answer about mass production and the prevalence of cookie cutter houses and people wanting to show their personality through yard décor. Ok, cool. I get the philosophy of yard decor. But why are the only things available gnomes, frogs in yoga poses, toadstools, and metal solar light flowers that look like a bad drug trip (and cost a fortune)?