My morning walk was cooler than it’s been in awhile. Gray skies and the possibility of rain. Still humid as hell, but when you’re in Florida in late August, a dip into the mid 70s can put a spring in your step. They say those gray skies may portend a Labor Day hurricane, but I’ll go ahead and enjoy them for now. I saw an older black […]
Folks you see
Rachel’s real estate
Here we have shrewd business plan: Rachel buys houses, then apparently sells them for about half what they’re worth. The two signs were a block apart here in Springfield, but the handwriting is eerily similar. It reminds me of the way certain Realtors used to put it in the flyers they’d stuff in your mailbox: “There’s never been a better time to buy OR sell!” In short, […]
A few rules for 2015
I no longer make New Year’s resolutions for myself, but I’m happy to make them for everybody else. Here are a few that come to mind after another stroll around my Springfield neighborhood: Vehicle owners: Quit parking on the goddamned sidewalk. Seriously, just quit it. I have refrained from keying your splendid ride for quite awhile now, but I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to […]
Time goes by
Here’s a little time-lapse video I made yesterday, just because I could. Nothing very dramatic, just another twilight at Casa del Dave in Springfield. That’s the Three Layers wine bar and coffee house across the street. As you can see, it was kind of a slow night. The camera was on a tripod on my porch. I left our resident pit bull outside just to discourage those […]
It was only us
When the wife and I go out to dinner, there are two conditions I hope to avoid: (a) Not being able to find parking, and (b) being the only customer in the place. Last night it was the latter. We went to the Uptown Market, partly because we really like the food and service there, and partly because they had recently announced new expanded hours and we […]
Sidewalk swine
In my neighborhood, people don’t just park on the street. They park on the grass between the sidewalk and street (called the CROW, for City Right of Way). They park on their lawns. They park in the alleys. And they all too frequently park on the sidewalk itself. That last part pisses me off. I guess it pisses a lot of people off here in Springfield: Somebody […]
Books for nothing
Little Free Libraries: Boon or boondoggle? Just kidding. These things seem to be popping up all over. While I like the principle — a neat little honor-based book exchange right in the neighborhood — the cynical bastard realist in me wonders how it works in practice. Today, for example, I walked a couple of books down to the one near me. They were books I didn’t want. […]