Or what time of day it is

Spent yesterday ... you know ... doing things. Going to Preuss Pet Shop --- as mentioned in passing on Stephen Colbert a week or two ago --- and finding they still didn't have the pet litter brand we prefer. I'm really hoping this is only a transient glitch because our loyalty club membership reached the point where we're owed a free bag of the stuff and it'd be a needless insult to never be able to redeem it.

Also I finally got around to repairing the curtain rods in the dining room. They've both been sagging, farther and farther, for years now. The one facing the Bro House had a hook that was all but fallen off. Ages ago I'd gotten some screws just small enough to fit the frames but never put together the energy to act on that. This time, I did. Got the power drill out of the basement and then decided it was easier to use the regular drill instead. I can't say I never got angry at the screws for how hard they were to get into the wood, but I got done with them anyway. Hoping now the things stay nice and secure.

Also, we got a second bird feeder this week, since our new bird feeder pole has hooks for up to eight things hanging. We're still using the same old seed in it, but there's broader perches, which we hope will let larger birds like blue jays know it's okay to come around again. There weren't any takers that day, because extreme high winds grounded all the area birds. There were a bunch of sparrows or other small birds on the new feeder today, though, the handful of times I checked. I haven't checked how this is affecting our rating on Bird Yelp but we'll see.

Finally, brought in the traps from the goldfish pond. While there's still going to be open water a while more, this seemed like the last day we could reasonably hope to catch anyone. And there weren't any more fish in the traps. I wanted to top the pond off, so that when it does ice over there's the maximum possible depth of water for anyone left outside, but it turns out our hose minder snapped at a critical point and I couldn't connect the hose to the outdoor faucet. So I have to hope there'll be enough rain while the weather is chilling down, assuming it does get really chilly this year.

I'm tired.

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Now for some more neighborhood decorations photos, because we had yet another anomalously warm stretch of weather. It seems to have finished, but we should not be seeing the upper 50s so much this time of year. But, it's an ill wind (and it was; portions of south Lansing were blown into East Lansing overnight) and it gave me a chance to wander around and photograph in comfort.

The ``Heartbeat of America'' house --- I guess they're Chevrolet fans --- lacked any particular decorating. But I stopped because of the curious antenna atop it. It's a weird shape you can't at all see in the photo here, but what am I going to do, walk all the way partway down the block to photograph it in daylight? But it has me wondering if this is just what you need to get over-the-air HDTV reception in our neighborhood (we can't get anything worthwhile using an indoor antenna) or if it's for a ham radio rig.

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Warm night! Some guy just lounging on the porch while enjoying the last(?) 60-degree night of the year.

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And a decorated enclosed porch lets the windows be filled up beautifully.

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Trivia: In 1499 a hundredweight of pepper at Venice's Rialto market cost eighty ducats. In India, the same weight could be had for three. Source: The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed the World, Amir D Aczel. (So I was originally picking out a piece of trivia about Ahman Ibn Majid, author of navigation textbooks and hired by Vasco de Gama as pilot to cross the Indian ocean, but research done in 2002 --- the year after the book's publication --- showed that no, the pilot was a Gujarati man whose name I can't locate without doing more work than I have evergy for. Apparently thinking now is that it's unlikely Ibn Majid ever met de Gama.)

Currently Reading: With Amusement For All: A History of American Popular Culture Since 1830, LeRoy Ashby. Mark Twain, offended by the cane check rule at a museum: ``Leave my cane! Leave my cane! Then how do you expect me to poke holes through the oil paintings?'' Twain gets cited as a humorist so often you forget he could just be funny.