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My wife and I dug a little deeper into my late Aunt Mary’s incredible trove of World War II photos. She was an Army nurse with the Johns Hopkins unit and helped patch up wounded GIs all over the South Pacific. The shot above is unlabeled but may be from an 8th Army hospital on Leyte (judging from other photos with locations noted) or possibly here. Pretty primitive, isn’t it? I doubt it matters where it is, but you can tell it’s somewhere hot and humid. Of all the hundreds of photos I have from this time, this is the only one I’ve found so far that was actually taken inside an operating room—if we can call it that. Either photography was forbidden or nobody had any damn time to play with cameras. Probably both!

More fun with iMovie: give a man a Mac and a blustery Saturday afternoon and he makes a book trailer. [NOTE: v.3 above] As usual, the video is HD and there’s 1:53 of it. For best results, set your YouTube player to 720p. There’s a lunatic impersonating me from almost seven years ago. The soundtrack features Aztec drumming and coyotes. It travels to a different state of mind. The question is, does this make you want to spend five bucks?

The answer is, I just had an inspiration for recording a soundtrack on the fly, but I need another gadget. (Heh)

The alert is for me, to make me pay attention. You’re looking at a gray fox in the back yard, just underneath a bird feeder. It’s been coming around to eat the sunflower seeds that fall down to the ground.

The way I found it was, I went to let the cat in but she didn’t move: frozen in mid-stride, hair straight up along her spine. When I opened the door a bit more, something whooshed around the corner and out of sight. I thought it was a coyote, although they don’t usually move that fast. Then yesterday I looked out from the living room, and there it was, about ten feet away, licking up the fallen seeds. So now things are coming to a head. For all my life, I’ve “fed the birds.” But suddenly this doesn’t look so good for Callie the Wonder Cat.

Gray foxes are rather small. Barely heavier than the cat in this case (if at all), but it’s likely they do go after pets. It’s hard to find any definitive guidance online. Some sites point out that full-grown cats are a lot for foxes to handle, others say not so. A Twitter follower who lives nearby told me old-timers here say they haven’t seen a fox “in many years.” Well, guess what?

Don’t get me wrong, I love the critters, but something must be done. First step is re-evaluating all the crap I feed the birds (and squirrels, and chipmunks, and raccoons). Last night my favorite local bull raccoon—about the size of a small hog, looks at me and sneers when I open the door and yell at him—not only wrecked my makeshift platform feeder the way he always does but also shit all over it. Maybe there’s a lesson here. The second step would be active intervention. I would never shoot a fox, although I have the means, but I would employ my hand-held freon air horn in the service of scaring him or her to death. The cat would probably run all the way to Santa Fe, but maybe she’d come back.

Gray foxes climb trees, too. No way for the Wonder Cat to make a getaway!

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Everyone else’s is dark brown and ours is green. For that and other reasons, this is kind of a special deal.

For over ten years there’s been a sharing arrangement with the garbage can. When the dead landlord was alive, we had a bigger thing we called “the dumpster” that I burned up one night by putting ashes in it. (Yes, I thought they were cold, and everything was neatly bagged.) It served three households: his, the neighbors’, and ours. After he died, we continued sharing with the neighbors, who opted for the smaller size that you see here. They were more or less in charge of it, apparently, due to the garbage setup having been included in the rent, and when the neighbor lady inherited their adobe, it became “their” garbage can.

I didn’t mind the change so much except that no one asked me. The new can couldn’t hold a broken office chair, dead TVs, old tires, roadkill feral hogs, and yard waste like the old one did. Somehow I adapted, though, and things smoothed out. After a second swivel chair bit the dust, I found an old wrecked minivan nearby to hide it in. There was other broken furniture inside that wasn’t mine.

When the neighbors moved away, they killed the garbage service, and I had the privilege of establishing my own account. I probably hadn’t done this for us ever, anywhere we’ve lived. The strange thing was, it felt so good.

My wife loves the bright green color. I like establishing control.

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