The Red Ribbon

Here's the scene at the cafe on the corner. Very Christmasy! I really should go out after work and take some pictures of holiday lights. That's perhaps the one good thing about darkness falling at 4:30 p.m. -- we have lots of time in the evening to enjoy light displays!

Yesterday was World AIDS Day, despite the refusal of the Trump Administration to recognize it. I've written before about AIDS and the impact it had on my life as a young gay man. Men of my generation, even if we didn't catch the virus, were indelibly scarred by it. (Men just a couple of years older bore the brunt of the plague, with huge numbers of them dying young.) So yesterday...

...I wore my red ribbon on my lanyard at work, as I always do on December 1. I wonder if the kids even know what it means. I did hear one student talking to the head librarian about a project she's doing on HIV and AIDS, so there is still awareness out there, for which I'm thankful.

Last night I re-read the Barbara Kingsolver essay about the Canary Islands that I saved many years ago, from her book "High Tide in Tucson." It was much as I remembered it -- a very evocative depiction of the landscape and the flora and fauna. But she didn't mention those spiny cacti once, and that was my clearest memory of the whole piece! She focused on the moister, more fog-bound environment of the laurel forests on La Gomera. Funny how the brain deceives. (I have since learned those "cacti" are actually a type of Euphorbia, and thus not cacti at all.)

Petrified Cranberry Sauce

This may look like some semi-tropical scene from Tenerife, but as you know by now, it's just our bird feeder with our resident, noisy parakeets. They and/or the squirrels have figured out how to remove the lid, so that top suet ball always disappears faster than the others. I could try to wire it down but I should really just get a new feeder. That one was here when we moved in and it has certainly done its duty over the past 11-plus years.

Yesterday was very quiet. I did laundry, including Dave's new pink shirt. I had visions of it staining everything else in the load pink but it didn't. I don't think that's really an issue anymore, is it? I think fabric and dye technology has improved beyond that. But I do still separate lights and darks, just like my mother taught me.

I pretty much caught up in Blogland and also managed my media, a never-ending task!

We've had an ancient can of cranberry sauce in the pantry for a while now. I have no idea when we bought it, but it expired in July 2024. Still, canned cranberry sauce won't really go bad, will it? I told Dave I was determined to eat it, and I opened it up and put it in my grandmother's special cranberry sauce dish, just as we always did during the holidays at home. Last night I had it with dinner (chicken) and it's perfectly fine.

And I put up our Christmas lights on the fiddle-leaf fig. This is as good as decorating gets around here. Merry Christmas!

Finally, I downloaded the weekly haul from the Garden Cam. We had very few videos this week, possibly because in the middle of the week I moved the camera to film the patio right outside our back door. I thought it would be interesting to see what critters venture close to the house. Answer: both Pale Cat and Q-Tip.

I first had the camera in the garden, where we see a couple of passing foxes and Pale Cat.
-- At 0:41 we get a peaceful garden scene of a pigeon, a flock of starlings and a squirrel rummaging through the fallen leaves. That lasts about a minute and it's my favorite part of this video.
-- After that, more foxes, including one moving very slowly at 1:45. I can't tell if it's injured or just being cautious and smelling the smells. It looks healthy when standing still.
-- At 2:05 the action moves to the patio, where Pale Cat wanders past.
-- At 2:25 a cautious fox spies the newly relocated camera and clearly doesn't like it.
-- At 2:43 an industrious squirrel buries a hazelnut. (Note to self: dig up nut so it doesn't grow!)
-- At 3:02, a daytime "Loch Ness" view of a passing fox's back, in the middle of the afternoon.

Now I've moved the camera back to the rear of the garden. I'd like to get more evidence of just how many foxes we're dealing with, and that's the only place I've ever obtained footage of two at once.