Mercury has Astroglide

General

Yesterday I was anxious, cranky, brittle. I had an idea why, and I did my best to not let it affect me or the people around me, although I may have telegraphed that and might have come close to the line or crossed it one or two times, and I did apologize to them for that. But it was a knot in my chest, a scribbled black cloud in my brain. I couldn’t escape it. I could only acknowledge it and move on.

This morning, I woke up and… that chaos had shifted. I was still janky, I was still anxious. My nerves were dancing like beads of water on a hot skillet. But it was… laughing. The negative scratches in my head had flipped and become positive giggles. What had changed overnight? There’s no way to tell. A manic, must-take-action devil had perched itself on my shoulder, urging me to action.

I channeled that feeling into Doing Projects™.

Before dad moved in my Kona Smoke 2-9 lived downstairs, leaned against the wall in the pathway from living room to kitchen/back door. It was in plain sight but out of the way, unless I needed to put something in the closet it blocked, which was rare. I put nothing important in that closet because it was blocked. QED.

When dad moved in, though, because of his mobility issues, I moved the bike upstairs to my computer room, my office. There wasn’t a good spot for it, so it leaned against my second desk, making that desk essentially useless. I used that desk for drawing and other projects; my computer desk is smaller and only big enough for my computer and the monitors. As long as I can get to the compute desk, things are OK.

Today, the gremlin inside me seized on getting that desk clear and finding a good spot for the bike, one that would be out of the way but still visible, so I don’t forget about it and maybe am encouraged to ride it again. Probably when the summer heat goes away, aye? Also, clearing that desk means when I start working from home I’ll be able to put my work computer there instead of working downstairs on the dining room table, or perched awkwardly on my computer desk.

A hook. I needed a hook, from which to hang the bike. There were a few good locations, a couple in the computer room, one or two downstairs, that would be perfect. Except I needed to make sure any hook I put up would be going into a stud.

My dad has always been handy; men of his generation nearly always were. So I asked him for advice. He suggested that a stud-finder is the best way to do that. So I went to the hardware store with my dad on a Sunday, which is a whole thing. At the store, we bought: the hook, the stud-finder, a replacement three-way LED light bulb for the downstairs lamp, a magnetic knife rack so I can finally get my knives out of the silverware drawer, and a whetstone for the knives.

The project list was a short one but I did every one. The manic pixie dream devil on my shoulder was appeased. Still don’t know where the energy had come from. Mercury must have Astroglide or somethin’.

Showing up

General

Here are some words so I can meet my daily goal of one post of at least 500 words. I’ve got a lot of feelings in my head and heart tonight but I am not in the mood to share so let’s see what else I can find to ramble about.

Kinda tired of the heat but as we all know, every summer is going to be hotter than the previous summer until the elites decide to stop killing the rest of us with their excess and hoarding. Or until we force them to pay attention. We do have the numbers, and they can’t actually get and stay rich if we were all united, I’m just sayin’. A little organization among us would go a long way toward making the world a better place.

I did manage to go out for a walk before the hot hot heat kicked in. I haven’t been closing my rings as much lately, pretty much exactly because of the heat and also my awesome new job which takes up a lot of my time and attention. Now that it’s the weekend, I just want to play my silly video games, work on my D&D game a bit, and not think about the world falling apart. Clearly I’m failing at that last goal. What can you do, aye?

As mentioned in my last post I do want to get a pet, a cat most likely. I think things are going to be stable enough that I can worry about someone not myself for a bit, and a cat would present just the right mixture of needs-attention and can-take-care-of-itself-sometimes, unlike, say, a dog, which to me feels a bit more dependent on direct attention. Dogs require excercise and walks and cleaning up their poop, where cats have the instincts to poop in one place, making cleanup a bit easier.

I have been drinking plenty of water, so that’s good. My calorie intake has been a bit high, and I’m not getting nearly enough fiber and protein, so I could be doing better in that regard. I will work on that one.

While dad was out on his dinner date, I went downstairs, took out the trash and the recycling, and mopped the kitchen floor. It was getting a little sticky, but it’s not anymore. Did you know that you can just use white vinegar to mop linoleum or whatever cheap apartments have for kitchen flooring? I added one cup of white vinegar to two gallons of hot water, and it worked like a charm. Once it dried you can’t even smell the vinegar, not that there was a lot to begin with.

Just need another fifty words. Good thing I allow myself to write out my thoughts. The whole point is to reach the goal, not make every post godsdamned poetic and perfect. These are the first drafts. I’m practicing showing up, not allowing my perfectionism to trip me up, y’know? I’m doing the best I can here.

What do you think about cats?

Joy

I said goodnight to my friends and logged out of 7 Days to Die. From my computer room, I could hear the faint noise of a TV drama playing downstairs. The wall of the stairwell flickered light and dim. I got up, picked up my empty 20 ounce beer can, and went downstairs.

“Hello!” I dragged out the vowels, trying to sound goofy.

Dad sat on the couch, watching TV. He angled his head to his left. His neck, now pinned with steel rods, didn’t have much articulation left. “Helloooo!” he said, mimicking my goofy tone.

“You’re back from the bar?”

“Yeah. I said it was me when I came in but you didn’t hear me.”

I patted his shoulder as I walked behind him; the couch was placed so the path behind it led to the back door and the kitchen. “I was online playing games with Max and Luke. Had my headphones on.”

“Oh.”

In the kitchen, I turned on the water to rinse the can out. There were a bunch of bottles by the sink, mostly glass Mexican Coke bottles. I kept the water running and started rinsing them out. Some of the bottles had a greenish tint to the glass; others appeared clear, at least in my yellowish kitchen light.

Behind me, through the open window between the living area and the kitchen, dad said “There were a lot of women at the bar tonight.” He said it deliberately but not slowly.

I chuckled. “Is that good, or bad?” Dad is an incorrigible flirt, even at 86ish years old.

“Well, that’s good!” Now his tone was bright, cheerful. “There were a couple of ladies in there I’d never seen before. One was a stone cold fox.” His use of old slang made me smile. I felt sentimental. Nostalgic.

I made a new… pile? Stack? What’s the word for a bunch of bottles standing up next to each other? Pile or stack implies verticality; these were horizontally arranged. I could hear dad grunt a little as he levered himself forward and up off the couch. He pointed the remote and turned off the TV, cutting his show off in mid-plot.

I poured a little dish soap on a sponge, and turned the faucet water warm but not hot. I started scrubbing the dishes and untensils in the sink.

Dad walked past me, tapping a cigarette out of a pack. He paused in the kitchen entryway, watching me wash. “I should have taken out the recycling.”

I tsked. “You don’t have to do that. You’re a guest.”

“Oh, fuck that. I can pull my own weight.” He opened the back door, and through the kitchen window I saw the flare of orange as he lit up in the dark on my patio.

I carried the bottles, three or four at a time, and dumped them in the recycling bin hung above my washer and dryer, in the closet. I was careful not to open the folding door to that closet too far, or it would prevent the back door from opening up, in case dad finished and wanted to get back in. The clear bottles and the green ones all made the same clinking noise. Yes, the bin was full, but I didn’t want to take it out tonight. That’s a tomorrow job.

That done, I saw dad’s bald head and beard softly glowing in the tobacco ember, outlined by the kitchen light through the window. I leaned against the door frame, watching him.

“What do you think about… cats?”

He again angled his shoulders to point his head at me, cigarette held between two fingers. “I like cats.” His tone of voice was exactly the same as his comment before about women being at the bar. “You, uh.. got a supplier?”

Was that a dirty joke? Or was he just being funny? I smiled. I snorted a short laugh. “I was just thinking, now that I’ve got a stable job, I’d like to have a cat. I think I can take care of it now.” Dammit, a surge of emotion threatened my eyes with tears. This moment. I wanted to remember this moment. I resolved the write it down, soon. “Maybe keep you company during the day, at least while you’re here.”

“Yeah. Cats are cool.” Dad took a drag on his cigarette, then leaned down and rubbed it out against the concrete. Standing back up as straight as his broken back would let him, he burst into a sudden arm-out throw, tossing the butt over the fence into the vacant lot behind the townhouses.

He chuckled, recognizably the same sound I make, the family sarcastic laugh. “Someday someone’s gonna do something with that lot, and they’re going to be pissed at all the butts over there.” As he walked past me back into the house, he didn’t, couldn’t, look up at me. For most of my adult life he’s been taller than me. Not anymore. I don’t think he could see the sad affection in my eyes.

Dreaming big

General

Bought a lottery ticket tonight. My usual, an Oregon Megabucks Quick-Pick, plus Kicker, for two dollars. I don’t have specific numbers I play, I just let the random machine pick the numbers for me, just like the random machine is going to pick the winning numbers. Adding the Kicker for a dollar more means that the ticket will win on 3 or more matching numbers, and if I get 4 or 5 winning numbers, the prize amount is more.

Screenshot of that annoying guy in Fallout New Vegas that yells about winning the lottery. Dark hair, glasses, punchable face, tattered clothing. The caption reads "Yeah! Who won the lottery? I did!" but the caption does not do justice to just how annoying this guy sounds yelling it, especially because it's outside Nipton which is on fire and devastated by Caesar's Legion. Everyone hates this guy.
Don’t be this guy. No one likes this guy.

I’ve written about buying lottery tickets before. If you do a search in the search thingy over to the left, you’ll find a lot of posts with the word “lottery” in them, and many of them are about buying a ticket. I almost never win, and by “almost never” I mean I’ve won a small amount (under a couple of hundred dollars) maybe 4 or 5 times in the decades I’ve been buying tickets. But I still play, because the idea of winning is enjoyable all by itself.

I buy the tickets and then I don’t check them, because I have a story that I play out in my head. The story goes, I forget about the ticket for weeks, and build up a stack of them, and then decide to work through the stack and see if any have won. And in the story, one of them does come back as a big winner. The whole enchilada. Millions of dollars with very little effort. And in the story, my delight at knowing that this battered piece of paper, that’s been sitting on my desk or in my glove compartment or tucked into my wallet, has been worth so much money this whole time.

I know it’s a strange story but somehow, the idea that I could have ignored it for a long time until the ticket expires and it’s no longer redeemable, but that I didn’t, I didn’t forget about it, is delicious to me. That imaginary satisfaction feels greater than the idea of actually having millions of dollars without having to trade thousands of hours of labor for it.

If I won

But then the next stage of the story kicks in. What would I do with that money? What do I really really want, if money was no object? Friends, lean in close, because when I dream, I dream big.

I want a roof over my head, a comfy bed to sleep in. I want to be warm in the winter, and cool in the summer. I want healthcare whenever I need it, without having to worry about how I will pay for it, without worrying about the United State’s innovation known as “medical bankruptcy.” I want clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and delicious food that won’t kill me faster than the healthy rate of dying. That’s it. That’s what I want.

Once I have that, I want to make sure that my family and close friends have all that, too, if I have any money left over.

If I have any money left over after that, I want to put that money into steering society in the direction of everyone having all those things. If I have to do it the hard way, one person at a time, that will have to do, but depending on how much money I have left over, I’d like to put systems in place to do that on as big a scale as possible. Neighborhood, city, state, nation. I would at least have time and energy to make a plan and work towards it, maybe get others to work with me. Assuming I had left over money.

If I’m doing that, and there’s any money left over at all, I want to see as much of this beautiful world as I can before my life comes to it’s end, but mostly I want to see a baseball game in every major league park. I want to drive on Blue Highways, listening to pleasant music, and at the end of my drive I want to eat local food, talk to local people, and listen to local bands. But that’s a lower priority.

What would you do if you won the jackpot? I’d love to hear it.

Campaign Pitch: The Council

DnD

When it comes to running a D&D (or TTRPG) game, I’m a big fan of the Campaign Pitch. I first heard about it from Matt Colville in a video on the exact topic. In the video he presents the idea that a Dungeon Master could present multiple ideas for a campaign to the players. The players would then pick and choose among the various ideas to come to a consensus about what kind of game they want to run. He gave his players a document outlining his pitches.

This is counter to the way many many games have started: a DM has a campaign idea, adventure, or setting, and the players find it all out as they play. Colville had a prep document listing four different ideas, with a brief summary of what the central tension would be, what setting or location it would take place in, and a rating of the three most important themes for each one.

He ranked them all on a scale of 1 to 3 for the level of Politics, Roleplaying, and Tactics involved. He did, in the video, suggest other options for what themes are important to the DM making the pitch, though he cautioned us to keep it fairly simple. No need to overwhelm the players with many detailed options, not at first.

I pitched several ideas to my players at the start. But all three of them said all my ideas sounded fun; they didn’t favor one over the others. And maybe I didn’t make each pitch distinct enough to catch the players attention, or convey to them that they did have choice and buy-in up front.

I think they’d get it, now, though. We have all learned a lot about how we all approach the game.

I like my current game and how it’s developing, and my players also seem engaged with the world. But that doesn’t stop me from coming up with new ideas, new frameworks for adventures and characters. Today, while on my lunch break, my mind wandered and I came up with this campaign pitch, in the style of Matt Colville.

A Council of Clerics

In the centuries since the fall of the Old Empire, the gods have retreated and become much less active in the world. Clerics, churches, divine and demonic favor still exist, but there is no single dominant religion or institution. But lawful and powerful people call for a Council; a long-abandoned temple will be a host for a meeting of the minds on the topic of Gods and Mortals.

Adherents of trickster, adversarial, or individualistic gods may seek to disrupt this Council, or manipulate it for their own gain… or their own power.

Likewise, spellcasters seek audience, or simply knowledge, and may be forming their own guilds and schools, to consolidate power and create formal paths of education.

The Temple itself, long abandoned, may hold secrets of its own about the fall of the Old Empire, and why the Gods have retreated from direct intervention. Its secrets would bear investigation, particularly in the presence of many powerful leaders and spellcasters.

  • Politics: High – there will be many factions, each with their own goals. Making friends and enemies will be key to navigating this place.
  • Roleplaying: Medium to High – in this context, roleplaying specifically refers to negotiation, diplomacy, and deception. It’s getting what you want through talking, not fighting.
  • Tactical: Low to Medium – There may well be fighting and tactical situations but they would not be the focus of the game, at least at first. Although bloodthirsty or avaricious creatures may find a single location filled with rich or powerful people very tempting as a target.

Player Buy-In: Your character will need to Have An Opinion about the gods, religion, or politics. The opinion can be positive or negative. There is much here to learn: people and personalities; history, recent or ancient; rumors and lore. Does that sound like a good time to you? If you just want to hit things with sharp or blunt objects until they fall down, you will probably not have any fun here because that will quickly be discouraged by the players involved.

Would that kind of game interest you? I’d love to hear from you.

The Poverty Tires

Cars

My car is old and slowly wearing out. I do a little maintenance now and then, but I can’t afford any big repairs or overhauls. Not gonna rebuild the engine or transmission, not gonna repaint it, not gonna beef up the suspension. I’m just driving it until I can afford something better.

There’s a mindset into which I fall. It’s a reaction to stress and not having enough safety or resources. A poverty mindset. I accept that this is all I can afford, and then I justify and rationalize that this is the only option. For some reason this mindset is easier to get into with regard to a car, although I know I’ve felt this way about my living spaces, as well. Adequate housing is a human right but if I’m depressed, the level of adequate for me and me alone gets lower and lower, y’know?

I know I’ve written about this before, but another reminder has come up, and again, it’s about my car. Specifically the tires.

When I first got the car, the tires were already a bit worn, and I was making less than poverty wages, so I put zero money into replacing them. I’d just top up the air once in a while, and as the tires wore further, I’d have to top them up more and more.

Until one day, one of the tires failed in an interesting but terrifying way: the pressure caused a big bubble to pop out, but the tire itself didn’t leak. It just bulged. As you can imagine, trying to drive that way caused the steering wheel to shake, and a tremendous noise. I was already stressed about my job at the time, which required a long commute. I feared the worst, as I often do, and thought that the suspension was damaged somehow.

A friend helped me out by correctly diagnosing the issue, and paying for four replacement tires, a cost of about $200 for OK-ish used tires. That was a cost I didn’t think I could afford, but I was wrong. I definitely couldn’t have afforded replacing the whole car, or the costs of an accident involving another car… or another person. I did have insurance but it was the bare legal minimum. I was lucky in not having anything worse happen.

From that point on, I did pay more attention to my tires. I kept them full. And I replaced them after normal wear, a year later. I had to use a credit card and pay it off over time, but I did it because I wanted to avoid that horrible out-of-control feeling that my car might kill me if I neglected it.

That next set of tires wore normally for a while, until the steering started to get a little wobbly and pull to the left, and then it started making noise again, and this time, I took it to a mechanic. The mechanic said I just needed to rotate the tires, which for the non-car person means to swap them around, left to right, basically (different cars have different rotation patterns.)

I drove them like that for a while, saving up for another new pair, and this time, I bought new tires from a tire company that offers a 10 year warranty. I did not buy the warrnaty. I didn’t think it was worth it. New tires was enough for my peace of mind. But at some point, I noticed one of the tires, the driver’s side front, had a slow leak.

Remember that poverty mindset I mentioned? I nursed that nagging slow leak for months, topping up the tire with a cheap air compressor I had, because I was again underemployed and afraid of spending money. I didn’t think I could afford to replace them.

And then the cheap air compressor broke. I didn’t have the means to bandage this problem anymore. I found the source of the slow leak: a nail stuck in the tread. That convinced me to bring the car back to the tire shop, where, to my amazement, they replaced the tire and it’s mate on the other side for a nominal fee.

The sales person explained that I could add on the warranty to cover all four tires for cheap; $10 per tire. They would then replace any tire for any flat or road damage for the next 10 years. It was finally worth it to me, after years of giving myself stress by trying to nurse along on the cheapest option.

That was a few months ago. I’ve been hypervigilant about tire pressure, since my cheap air compressor was broken and I was once again unemployed. Last night, though, after getting a good payday, I bought a new air compressor, and because it was a Prime Day special, got it overnight.

Just went out to the car to check the pressure and top up all the tires. I assumed after months of driving they’d be dangerously low. This is the point where my poverty mindset had fucked me up.

The tires were low but not dangerous. And I had the tool I needed to fix it, by spending a little money. I can afford basic maintence. I don’t have to live with broken and failing things.

Might be time to buy a newer car, Brian.

Bar Talk

Portland

I had Google Maps up on my phone, swiping around, trying to find the name of the hill in Southeast Portland dad and I had driven by on the way to the bar. “I don’t think Google has it labeled. Was it Mt. Scott?” I showed the phone to dad, sitting next to me, facing the mirror and the rows of bottles, ripe for the drinking.

“Yeah, I guess that’s it,” he conceded. “I didn’t realize that it extended all the way to the freeway.”

“I thought the one you were thinking about was more to the east. I guess that’s it.” I put the phone away.

Dad’s head wiggled, a smile on his face. “I have fond memories of it. Your mother and I used to go up there to neck.”

I just shook my head. “Yeah, yeah. That was a long time ago.” I took a sip of my beer, a slightly-not-so-hoppy IPA, perfect for the summer heat outside. Inside, the bar was cool, and dark, lit in orange and red, punctuated by flourescent (not neon, not anymore) and LCD screens.

The music, some pop song I didn’t recognize, pulsed in the background.

Dad sipped his drink, too, lost in memories. I felt a surge of compassion. I was happy to share these moments with him. I’m grateful he’s still around, still telling stories, still a part of my life. The short-term stay while his place was being remodeled had become months, but it was a good thing.

“There was a place out on Foster your mother and I used to go to, with Ray and Carol,” he said. Ray and Carol were from mom’s side of the family; Carol was one of mom’s younger sisters, Ray her husband. Both of them had passed, Ray a long time ago, Carol more recently. There were fewer and fewer of my aunts and uncles, a tale as old as time.

“What kind of place?”

“Oh, they had music, and dancing. Food, bar food.” He swirled his glass. The ice clinked. “It’s probably long gone now.”

“We should go try to find it sometime.” My car wasn’t much, an old beater, but it would still take dad and me out on the backroads of Clackamas County some summer evening.

“It was all open fields and farmland back then. Now it’s… developed.” Dad’s gravely voice dropped an extra octave in disdain, turning that final word into a curse.

I sang, “Houses made of ticky-tack, and they all look just the same!” I laughed. “You taught me that song.”

“I did! I can’t remember where I learned it. Probably some commercial jingle.”

“Those damned commercials sure get stuck in our brains. What else d’you got in there?” I squinted at him.

His face, rough, lined, skin a bit loose on his skull, eyebrows bushy over pale blue eyes, turned toward me from the shoulders. He had to look left and right like Batman since they put the metal rods in his spine. “I still have my mind. It’s the body that’s kinda falling apart.”

What even is happening?

Politics

I don’t have anything to say about the Big Event™ that happened last weekend.

It’s just A Thing That Happened™ to me. Can’t even process it. Don’t at me bros.

Weekend Wrapup

General

Winding down for the evening. Don’t have any one thing in particular to write about. Just a handful of topics, things on my mind, tasks I completed and tasks I’ll complete in the coming weeks.

My Kona Smoke 2-9 bike is 16 years old this weekend. I’ve had it a long time and I have put many miles on it. Not so much lately; no, now it sits in my computer room, propped up against a table, its tires flat and its cables and gears loose and unmaintained. I bought it and rode it in the World Naked Bike Ride in 2008, and several years after that. Is that still a thing? For almost two weeks I rode it 26 miles round trip to and from my apartment in Sellwood to my call center job in Fairview, in the middle of the summer, until I was able to buy a cheap car from my cousin. And there were many many pleasant rides up and down the Springwater Corridor Trail, spring, summer, and winter.

It’s a good bike. I should definitely get back on it. They say you never forget how to ride one. That’s what they say.

This weekend I spent mostly doing chores like grocery shopping and laundry, and many hours in The Long Dark. I’m trying to get the final achievement (for me) in the game: suriving 500 days in-game on one save. I’ve done all the story bits one can do, the DLC stuff, I’ve already been to every map, so now I have to make my own goals to keep going. My plan is to stock up regional bases all over the island. That should eat up some time.

Every base will have 100 pounds of meat; 5-10 gallons of water; basic first aid – bandages, antibiotics, disinfectant; one of every kind of tool – knife, hacksaw, hatchet, prybar; matches; some crafting materials for repairs; at least one cooking pot; and some source of Vitamin C to prevent or cure scurvy. Plus whatever else I think of. I can come up with a more detailed list but that’s the basics. I’m doing this all on Voyageur because I am not a masochist. I like the chill vibes of the standard level of difficulty.

I’ve set up a base in Forsaken Airfield at the Hangar, another one at the Train Depot in the Transfer Pass; and one at the Maintenance Shed in Broken Railroad. I’m currently at the Camp Office in Mystery Lake. It’s about day 330? Future bases will be in Milton, Pleasant Valley, Timberwolf Mountain, and Coastal Highway. I’m being sadly efficient and might have to come up with another goal after I’ve done this one because it’s going faster than I expected.

Other fun stuff I did this weekend included plotting for my D&D game. I have a good plan for how to handle the next session but I have no idea where the story is going to go after that. That’s how I like it, though. I don’t plan out long arcs, I just take what the players want to do and set goals and obstacles in front of them. Works well for me.

That’s a good weekend, right? That’s enough? I sure hope so.

Surprise Joy

Joy

When you start looking for something, you start to find it more and more. Or maybe you just notice it more. I’ve been trying to find a little joy in my life. Just starting out I didn’t find much, but it’s starting to show up more and more.

Portland has been having a heat wave for the past week or more, with temperatures in the high 90s and even reaching 100 a couple of days. Since Portland is not built with high heat in mind, unlike say Phoenix, so folks are generally miserable unless they’ve been able to spend the money to upgrade. I’ve got a single window air conditioner unit that I install when the temperature goes up, and it works OK.

The office I work in has decent air conditioning so my work day is covered. I tend to buy lunch so I have to leave to get food, but there are plenty of close places for foods. My car, my old slowly-falling-apart mid-90s Honda, used to have working air conditioning but sometime before this summer it stopped blowing cold air, so my commute home has been sweaty.

Driving in the heat does not spark joy, not for me. I’m not a fan of driving in traffic, and being uncomfortably hot increases the stress and anxiety. With the windows down, the noise makes it hard to hear music; music would help, surely.

So there I was, last week, driving home in the hot, hot, heat. This was before my recent confidence boost, so I was anxious and full of self-doubt, trying to talk myself into accepting that this was a good job, that I did fit in, that I could do this. Will I fit in here? I stopped at a Plaid Pantry to pick up some Mexican Coke and a lottery ticket, because a) my dad and I love Mexican Coke, and b) can’t win if you don’t play, right?

Picture, somewhat faded from being taken facing the sun, of a stair and sidewalk that leads between two rows of townhouses. On the sidewalk, in the middle distance, is a five foot tall inflatable orange dinosaur.
This little spot of color made my evening.

I pulled in to my parking lot. I drove toward my reserved parking spot. And sitting on the sidewalk between the townhouses was a splash of bright orange: a 5′ tall inflatable orange dinosaur. A delightful and unexpected sight, putting a smile on my face. Where did this dinosaur come from and why is it here?

On closer inspection, the dinosaur had a hose fitting near its foot, and its mouth had a sprinkler outlet. One of my neighbors had bought this and had been using it (or planned to use it) to keep cool from the heat. I’ve seen the neighbor kids playing with the hose, or water balloons; this was just another sun mitigation tactic. A silly and fun mitigation.

I got a selfie with the dinosaur, because of course I did. Looking at the picture now, I don’t look very happy. I’m good at masking, turns out. I blame the hot, hot, heat for my blank expression, but, reader, inside my heart sang. I was so happy to have this surprise dinosaur outside my apartment, you have no idea.

Selfie of the author, a middle-aged white man wearing glasses, an Adidas baseball cap, and a green plaid shirt, standing in front of an orange inflatable dinosaur. Apartment windows and doors are in the background.
I may not look happy but believe me, I was.

A sign from the universe that says “you never know when something silly will drop in to your life, Brian” which is the kindest sign I could have received. Thank you, universe.