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I don't see my neighbors often because they are Morning People (TM) and both our households are acting like the pandemic is still on (it is), but yesterday I happened to be taking Charlie out for a walk when they were coming home from something, and the kid "Checkers" was dumbstruck.

Charlie isn't a Big-big dog, but he is 60lbs and mostly leggy sighthound, so he is significantly taller than the average toddler. Since Checkers' extended family is largely allergic to mammals, they do not see dogs at other people's houses nor at daycare, so this was the fist time they've seen an animal larger than they are up close.

It is a beautiful thing to see a young human experience a sudden and profound shift in their worldview, and you get to witness parts of their brain being rewired in real time across their face. Confusion, then wonder as a fascinating new category of life opened before them. It is doubly wonderful that small children are rarely frightened of things unless they are taught to be, so, cautiously, Checkers approached Charlie, looking between us and making interrogative noises at me, as I was clearly his parent, and therefore responsible for introductions.

"This is Charlie!" I say. "He might or might not say hi back."

Checkers considered the evidence before them: Charlie has a name shared with their playmates, their older sibling is largely nonverbal, and Charlie wears a chest harness with leash, again like some of their playmates, and came to the extremely reasonable conclusion that Charlie is a fellow Human Child, and introduced themselves appropriately:

"Hullo." Said Checkers, stepping up to Charlie. "This is Bionicles." they continued, holding up their plush giraffe toy, the appropriate way to introduce yourself and your friends/interests to a new peer at age 3.

Charlie has a vast preference of humans to other dogs, and of adults to children within humans, often ignoring or evading small children the way he does with dogs that annoy him. It makes sense- small children are not usually the ones with treats, and typically inept petters at best. But something about Bionicles the Giraffe intrigued him and he politely sniffed and listened to Checkers talk about (I'm not sure because I have Audio Processing Problems and Checkers doesn't enunciate much) for a for about a minute, and I got to witness Checkers' parents undergo a similar world-shift as they realized Checkers was addressing Charlie as a fellow human, and how that was entirely rational of them.

The confusion on the adult humans was so interesting that I failed to notice Charlie very delicately taking Bionicles The Giraffe from Checkers until he had taken two steps to give himself room, and then started to Death-Shake the toy, because Charlie ALSO loves plushies, just in a very destructive sense.

I am horrified. The parents are Horrified. Checkers is DELIGHTED, laughing as Charlie very expertly separated Bionicles' head from the rest of the toy, and sat down in the grass to pull the fluff out.

I retrieved both pieces of the toy from Charlie, apologized profusely, took him home, and then came back to sew Bionicles' head back on.

Yesterday I saw Checkers on all fours out in the front yard, trying to re-decapitate Bionicles with their teeth while their father looked on, resigned. We have arranged a future playdate between Charlie and Checkers, with a handful of dollar-store stuffed toys for them to destroy together.

My husband get up very early for his Real Adult Job, and feeds Charleston (Black-and-cream Sighthound mix, mostly leg) and Herschel (40lb cardigan welsh crime tube), then lets them out into the fenced yard before he leaves.

I get up at the same time but take longer to boot up, so the dogs frolick about and discourage the local tree rats from lingering about the property while I get dressed/brush my teeth/try to not be psychologically crushed by The Horrors (TM)

Now it's pretty normal for me to find Herschel doing a high-speed yet startlingly efficient MC Hammer Shuffle on his stubby little legs around the base of the large honey Locust tree we have in the middle of the yard so he could keep his face pointed directly up the trunk at something in the canopy, because this his how he tries to herd squirrels.

...but Charlie is usually nearby, cheerfully play-bowing and encouraging the squirrel to come down, nothing bad will happen-!

This time Charleston is nowhere in sight.

-but my house has a porch on the second story that affords me a terrific view of my neighborhood and the Colorado Front Range and I was partaking of some peace before the 4th Of July Finger-Loss Festivities begin, and I have had a

~*Spiritual Experience*~

I just watched my neighbor try to unload an actual wooden pallet that had to have been forklifted into the back of his insecurity pickup worth of fireworks.

Except that he does not have a forklift in his garage.

He does have so much sports memorabilia and cardboard boxes of unsold MLM Merchandise and patriotically themed camping gear and posters of women in bikinis and flags of suspect political organizations in his garage that there is only BARELY enough space for the fireworks and certainly none for his truck.

So he had to unload the individual boxes of recreational explosives from the back of his truck and stack them in the minimal space he had cleared by hand. This is a tedious and time-consuming process as this neighbor has purchased a wide variety of recreational and locally illegal explosives instead of many of just a few types, so the individual boxes are rather small.

He begins, and this is crucial to what happens next, by cutting apart the industrial-grade saran wrap his explosives dealer had so carefully wrapped his merchandise in, and discarded it unsecured on his lawn.

Where Outdoor Conditions sometimes happen.

has given thier child

an airhorn.

Lovely family.

Around this time last year thier grandmother came to visit and gave them honest-to-goodness home-made black-powder Cherry bombs direct from Texas, which the boys immediately took to the most flammable patch of chaparral in the neighborhood and set off six of them at once, resulting in a small wildfire, seven emergency response units and a helicopter, a Long Stern talk from the fire department and Karen getting in a screaming match with Child Protective Services and a sizeable crater in the middle of the field.

At least according to Olivia the ER nurse and neighborhood gossip. I was out of town at the time and believe about 80% of that becuase I saw the crater where there had not been a crater a week before, and becuase karen threw a shoe at me the one time I asked if she was alright when she was having her weekly drunk-cry on the porch.

But I Digress.

1. It’s been pointed out to me that Golden State is an NBA franchise and not an institution of higher learning. To be fair, Diane is 84 and in an Alzheimer’s unit, and I know fuck all about sportsball. Perhaps her grandson lives in San Francisco.  Regardless, we all had a good time and I was sent home with leftover bean dip.

2. I sometimes misspell things becuase I have multiple learning/reading disorders and Public Education in the US is terrible. I’m funny anyway.

3. Last I heard, Richard had gone to live with the other, less pyrotastic set of grandparents, so maybe there is hope for them yet.

(As always, all names have been changed to protect people’s privacy):

The neighborhood consists of a 206 pallette-swapped versions of the same three houses surrounding the largest hospital in the next six counties in any direction, surrounded immediately by three ranches on one side and roughly 100 miles of uninterrupted rocky mountain wildreness on the other.  It’s seperated from the main city (If you can call a city with only the bars and Denny’s open after 9PM a city.  Which you can’t) by a large mountain ridge and connected via a small canyon highway.  Hence, the neighborhood consists primarily of:

Middle-Class Suburban White People ™

People who’d be too poor to afford this neighborhood normally, but are subsidized by the hospital.  Olivia the ER nurse, for instance.  They’re terrific.

People with Major Medical Conditions and Their familes, who live nearby, also subsidized by The Hospital.  

Old Rural People who remember when Durango had only the train track and no paved roads and was mostly populated by cattle and will tell you they were present at the Alamo if you let them keep talking.

Wildlife that was here first and has no intention of moving.

This is a story about the first learning about the last. 

Staci-With-An-I-From-Ventura-California introduced herself to me as that while I was walking the dog by the playground, as I tried to keep her preschooler twins (there are SO MANY goddamn twins in the neighborhood.  I mean, we’re right next door to an IVF clinic BUT STILL) from jamming thier fingers up Charlie’s nose but fortunately he thinks children are hilarous and decided to lick what I sincerely hoped was jam off thier faces.

“Hi I’m [Gallus]. Hey, kids, be gentle with dogs-”

“Do you live here?”  She asks in what I would find out later is her normal interrogative voice, but sounded to my untrained ear like a member of the spanish inquisition had reccived operatic training then took up chain smoking.

“Yeah?”

It also includes these fascinating paragraphs about the role of estrogen in different types of physical activity, directly debunking the widespread notion that estrogen is the weak human's hormone and only does weak human things:

Given the fitness world's persistent touting of the hormone testosterone for athletic success, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that estrogen, which females typically produce more of than males, plays an incredibly important role in athletic performance… The estrogen receptor—the protein that estrogen binds to in order to do its work—is deeply ancient. Joseph Thornton of the University of Chicago and his colleagues have estimated that it is around 1.2 billion to 600 million years old—roughly twice as old as the testosterone receptor. In addition to helping regulate the reproductive system, estrogen influences fine-motor control and memory, enhances the growth and development of neurons, and helps to prevent hardening of the arteries. Important for the purposes of this discussion, estrogen also improves fat metabolism. During exercise, estrogen seems to encourage the body to use stored fat for energy before stored carbohydrates. Fat contains more calories per gram than carbohydrates do, so it burns more slowly, which can delay fatigue during endurance activity. Not only does estrogen encourage fat burning, but it also promotes greater fat storage within muscles… which makes that fat's energy more readily available. Adiponectin, another hormone that is typically present in higher amounts in females than in males, further enhances fat metabolism while sparing carbohydrates for future use, and it protects muscle from breakdown. Anne Friedlander of Stanford University and her colleagues found that females use as much as 70 percent more fat for energy during exercise than males. Estrogen's ability to increase fat metabolism and regulate the body's response to the hormone insulin can help prevent muscle breakdown during intense exercise. Furthermore, estrogen appears to have a stabilizing effect on cell membranes that might otherwise rupture from acute stress brought on by heat and exercise. Ruptured cells release enzymes called creatine kinases, which can damage tissues… Linda Lamont of the University of Rhode Island and her colleagues, as well as Michael Riddell of York University in Canada and his colleagues, found that females experienced less muscle breakdown than males after the same bouts of exercise. Tellingly, in a separate study, Mazen J. Hamadeh of York University and his colleagues found that males supplemented with estrogen suffered less muscle breakdown during cycling than those who didn't receive estrogen supplements.

the red light (2023)

The noble suitors, who have never sewn a thing in their lives, sabotage themselves by their own ambitions: they choose difficult fabrics to work with and cut huge, elaborate patterns and select gems and pearls and beads to sew onto it, and snip such long bits of thread that they lose time detangling their stitches, and ultimately resort to pinning bits together as they run out of time, so that their offerings initially look beautiful and flashy, but when the princess tries them on they stick her with pin ends and fall apart as she moves.

The humble protagonist uses a very simple pattern without embellishments and sews using short lengths of thread (snipped off and threaded for him by little birds of course) which don't tangle and therefore save time. His dress is plain by contrast, but holds together and the princess is able to move freely in it, and so he wins the contest and her hand.

I particularly think about the bit about threading the needle with shorter lengths of thread, needing to tie off more often but avoiding tangles and thereby saving time.

So I have a friend that used to be in the tumblers troupe at the renfaire as a contortionist

We were chatting online and she told me to tell you all this story.

I love Kat dearly

but she forgets that she’s stupid strong and hypermobile

so one day she throws her back out

bad enough that she needed painkillers and couldn’t stand upright

“But also I needed Tampons and like.  A Burrito, real bad.”

she’s flat on her back in her apartment when she decides this

and, in an

impeccable

leap of reasoning, decides

“I can’t roll my back forward to sit/stand up like normal.

But I can ARCH my back just fine.

SO 

I’m going to do that and get on my hands and feet in a stomach-in-the-air this-shit-belongs-in-a-horror-movie-type pose,

And amble on down to the 7-11”

“And get me that Burrito”

It is, 

for context, 

after midnight in July during a wildfire so it’s hot as satan’s own asshole and the moon is red and shit’s already generally cursed.

Imagineyou are some poor sap working nights at the world’s deadest 7-11, and you hear the door jangle but you don’t see anyone’s head over the counters.

Whatever.

Except you keep hearing noises like there’s someone in the next aisle over.  

Fucking around in the burrito section

It’s also worth mentioning that Kat

1. sings whatever earworm is currently running through her head when she’s not paying attention

2. sounds EXACTLY like some kind of creepy child from a horror movie when doing so

tonight’s song is something from veggietales.

DUDE ACTUALLY STANDS HIS GROUND

and/or is really fucking high and isn’t sure if he’s tripping balls or notanyway

Kat goes up to pay for her burrito and tampons

She realizes the counter presents something of a challenge, and then demonstrates for me on her kitchen table at 4AM during a different july wildfire, 

exactly 

how she used the shelves to climb up the counter 

like one of the boston robotics beasties

dude stares at her for like, five minutes and says.

“Register’s broke.”

“Oh No!” Says Kat. “Just Take ‘em.” “Really?  I can leave cash-you don’t have to give me change I don’t want you to get in trouble with your manager.” “…Nah.” “Oh!  OK!  Thank you!” “Yeah ok bye.”

Shortly after she arrived back at the apartment, she got a text on her phone from the campus security about  "A Suspicious Individual” at tle 7-11. 

It took her 

FOUR

FUCKING 

YEARS