PopWars

There were nine women in our yoga class this morning. Other than the teacher I was the only guy. And then we went to the women-run bakery where all the clientele were women. Just saying.

The Cornus Mas trees look like Forsythia from a distance but more like bright yellow popcorn up close. It’s too early for the Forsythia to be in bloom. Daffodils are out the ground and might go yellow next week if we get to that 60 degree mark.

If I have an opportunity to shoot mugshots of a group of friends again I would do it with a 3D, the ones that swivel around your head. And then I would do the portraits in miniature on a 3D printer. Duane sent us a picture of self-portrait, bobble-head like prototype that a business associate of his did. I can’t get the concept out of my head.

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This photo looks a bit like a Maxfield Parish painting, idyllic and perfectly lit. When we were in LA we walked to the top of Bel Air Road. Anyone can do this. Walking on public roads is still free although you do risk your life. There are no sidewalks in this part of the country. You can’t see Stone Canyon Reservoir from the road but there was an open house here and from the patio in the back yard you have a fantastic view. The house is a fixer-upper at six point three million.

Back on the east coast the Winter Acconite is out. The beautiful yellow flowers are in full bloom before tonight’s snowfall. The geese are overhead, squeaking their way north. Equally idyllic on the idylometer.

We sat with my mom for a bit this afternoon. She gave us her take on her suite mates. Most of them drive her crazy. An aide, assisting a blind woman across from my mom, was encouraging the woman to drink her lemonade. “Drink it up. It has your Metamucil in it. The longer it sits, the thicker it gets. Ba da boom, bad da ba!”

Four of the five musician/artists included in the April, Little Theatre art show met there tonight to talk out the details. That took about five minutes after which we got down to what artists and musicians do best. We shot the shit over beer.

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I haven’t done any of the tutorials yet so I’m still discovering the surprises built into my Apple Watch. I synced some photos with it last night. The watch is a vertical format so it crops them and they look all new on my wrist. I’ve hit the Siri button on the watch many times but it has only been by mistake so I never had a request for it. Today I said “play the stooges” and right on cue “I Wanna Be Your Dog” came out of Peggi’s phone.

“It Never Rains in California” is not by the Mamas and Papas. I was always fooled by that. Well it does rain. My sister-in-law discovered she has leaks in her living room after the recent downpours in LA. But there is a severe shortage and I am a slow learner. I like to daydream in the shower. Ive even left the water running while I brushed my teeth. We live near the shores of one of the world’s largest bodies of fresh water. We have friends who live on the lake and they complain the level is too high. In SF we discussed strategy, options and proceedures before taking a shower. I choose to wait three days, accumulating extra minutes before jumping in.

Every neighborhood has a go-to guy, someone like Sparky who lived next door to us in the city or Jared who lives next door to us in Irondequoit, someone who virtually owns the street. Rich and Andrea have a guy named T.J. who lives in one of the funkiest houseboats on the docks. He also owns another dock as a workshop and a place for all his stuff, the kind stuff you see in this photo, an ever-changing performance art space and floating installation.

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We seem to always catch my mom when she is eating. They get her up early for breakfast and of course she has a full lunch, an afternoon snack and then a hearty dinner. After that it’s time for bed. All part of “the program” as my mom calls it. My mom doesn’t like the program and asks us if she is almost finished with this program.

She usually sits at the same table but they mix it up. Each table has at least one aide, sometimes feeding residents on both sides. They say they try not to have too many “feeds” at one table. My mom doesn’t eat as much as she used to but she needs no assistance and works her way through the meal in an orderly fashion. Some residents are given each item on the menu separately. I assume they would go right for the dessert if it was all put down at once. And we watched the woman sitting next to my mom try to steal her cookie.

Some people have all their food ground up. Their plates have the same items on them as the rest but each item on the menu is shaped like a scoop of ice cream.

The woman sitting next to us yesterday never woke up while she was at the table. The staff tried to shake her a few times but just let her sleep. Near the end of the meal my mom asked us if the woman was dead.

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We used to play this card game called “Indian Poker,” a politically incorrect name no matter what kind of Indian it was named after. You would pick a card and not look at it but stick it to your forehead so all the other players could see it. I think you then bet on whether you thought you had he highest card or something. It was kind of hard to keep a straight face while watching someone go of broke with a two or a three on their forehead.

When we stopped up to see my mom yesterday she had a dark sign of the cross on her forehead. Even though her home is non-denominational they have a record of your religion and I was surprised to see about half of the residents with smudge marks on their heads. My mom’s was the darkest. I said, “I see you got your ashes for Ash Wednesday.” She said, “What?” like she had already forgotten about it, so I just let it go.

“So the only thing to do was to drive up and watch the city from Observatory Crest“

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They had to pull open the dividers in the big meeting room tonight at the library in order to accommodate the overflow crowd for a presentation called “The Eastern Coyote” by Scott Smith of the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation. Channel 8 was there with a video camera. Channel 10 showed up about halfway through the presentation. Peggi estimated a couple hundred people in the room.

We have 2 to 3 coyotes per square mile here, two times more than they have in the Adirondacks. There are 25,000 in New York State with the highest density in the Mohawk Valley. Of course Scott talked about coydogs, a cross between a coyote and you know. They have apparently been bred out in the colder northern climates but they are quite prevalent in the Carolinas.

I always thought wolf, coyotes and foxes would coexist as similar species but wolf eat coyotes and coyotes eat foxes and foxes eat rats, rabbits, chipmunks and so on down the line. Coyotes mate for life but fool around. Seventy per cent of their diet is deer but they don’t kill most of them, they are good at finding dead or injured deer.

An email had recently circulated among our neighbors, one that started with a women who spotted a deer head near her house when she was walking her dog. A deer hunter was the first to reply and he thought it could have been left by coyotes because they don’t like the head. Other neighbors chimed in with their recent coyote sightings.

Scott’s slides show all different colors of coyotes. I spotted what I thought was a red fox this morning. It was slinking through the trees in the woods across from our house. Stella, our eighteen year old, all white cat, was out while I grabbed the paper. I’m thinking the coyote got her. At least, I’d prefer to think that’s what happened to her. We had to have the vet put her down this afternoon because she had stopped eating.

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