Category: Blog

Wildlife XVI: The Dead Of Night

  • April 25, 2020

Maybe you’ve heard the stories of nature encroaching as man stays home? I was wondering if that was happening even in our own backyard, and dragged out the (old, borderline obsolete) wildlife camera for another bout of surveilling. Here’s what I found…

The usual suspects were of course represented. As you know by know squirrels are so abundant I sometimes wonder if they own this house and we just rent. The deer (with baby) photo I had to adjust since it was near pitch black. The nights have been dark recently and the animals have skulked with abandon.

KLS and I were just debating the difference between doves and pigeons but we’re 99% sure this dude is a dove since we’ve recently had one lurking. When they sing – or rather make their dove noises – it really carries and it can be difficult to tell where they are. Yesterday there was one on our roof (I think?) and his cooing filled the house.

We’ve had rabbits living in our backyard for years and they’re a common sight during the day nibbling at the edge of our lawn. Sometimes they’ll come up onto the patio in the middle of the day and make good viewing for the kitties. Apparently they hop around at night as well.

So with the expected visitors out of the way, time for some not-so-common ones:

A racoon! There were several shots of this guy over a few nights. Aside from some rock-hard break (see below) we hadn’t put food out so he was probably just exploring. In a few photos it looked like he was even grooming. I guess he’s comfortable on our patio.

There were only a couple of shots of this possum, and they were separated by over a week. He’s decently sized (about as big as a small cat). I wonder where he lives?

This one is a mystery. See that black thing at the edge of the yard? We’re not sure what it is! The likely culprit is a fat dog with a tiny tail looking away from us, but in all the aeons we have lived here we have never seen a dog running wild (which is not allowed in NY State). Therefore I’m inclined to think it’s either a giant unidentified black cat like the Beast of Exmoor. What do you think?

This last pic is even more mysterious! See that half-blurred thing flying by? Is it a bumblebee? A wasp? A hummingbird? A goldfinch? The camera doesn’t have a super-fast shutter speed so whatever it was is flying somewhat slowly, but the size seems to preclude an insect since it isn’t that close to the lens. A genuine mystery. What do you think?

Incidentally you can see one of our doorstop-breadrolls in the above pic, just at the edge of the patio on the right. I was hoping for some evidence of who took them but there was none. Between two empty daytime photos separated by 23 minutes the roll had just disappeared. The rolls were (we think) too big and heavy for a squirrel, so whatever took them was too fast for the camera! Another mystery unsolved…

  • Posted in Animals
  • Robert

The PEZ Factory

  • March 7, 2020

We went for a day trip today to here:

The PEZ factory! In case this is a mystery PEZ candies are those little sugar bullets that are sold in special dispensers. You flip back the head and a candy comes out. I’ve amassed a collection of Star Wars dispensers that I’m not proud of but I hate the candies and never eat them!

It was a bit of a drive away: over two hours and two states, but it was worth it.

It’s where they make the candies and package them (the dispensers are made in Europe). They have a factory and museum, but since it was a Saturday the factory wasn’t on. But the museum was fantastic.

They have an incredible amount of dispensers on display. Thousands I’m sure, in every category imaginable. Although I secretly hate them I was fascinated by the displays.

The older ones are quite crude (Peter Pan here was from 1969) but the modern ones – almost all licensed – are much more sophisticated.

They had an astonishing amount of slight variants of some of them…

Strange old foreign versions…

Super rare dispensers…

And some very old ones that predate the current ‘head-on-a-stick’ style…

They also had – to our amazement – licensed Japanese ones including Gundam and Ultraman!

But there was so much more than just the dispensers! PEZ is after all a candy (invented in Germany in the 1930s) and they also had an incredible amount of packaging and marketing ephemera on display:

And advertising posters (many featuring the ‘PEZ girls’ used heavily in European advertising):

Bizarre items such as vinyl records:

And then truly strange stuff like a calculator, CCG pack, electronic game and very old sticker:

I loved this museum! It was basically PEZ otaku paradise. I hate PEZ’s (surely they’re the worst ‘candy’ ever made?) but I really loved looking through the small but jam-packed museum.

They even had a treasure hunt going on that we completed and won a prize from:

It was absolutely worth the trip: this place was PEZ-tastic!

But I still hate the candies 🙂

Long Time Man

  • March 3, 2020

I saw an interview yesterday with a British bloke who is 112 years old. His earliest memory was from WW1 and was a Zeppelin attack on his town in the UK. This got me thinking of my oldest memories…

I lived an adventurous life as a baby, fighting off cannibals in the jungles of PNG before jet-setting half away around the world for an extended stay in Germany. I don’t remember any of those days, and the earliest memories I do have come from just before I entered Kindergarten, back in about 1976.

I have two very specific memories from that era. The first is of brushing my teeth at daycare. I would have been 4 years old, and while I have dim memories of the daycare itself (playing with Duplo, listening to stories being read to us and sleeping on cots) I have a strangely vivid memory of a lesson on how to brush our teeth where we all copied what the instructor (a dental nurse?) did in front of us.

The next vivid memory – also I suspect from around that time – was of a heavy metal cylinder falling onto my head and cutting me. It left a scar that remains to this day! Bernard was hoisting it up a tree for an inscrutable child-reason and I was standing directly underneath ‘helping’ when the string broke and it fell directly onto me. I recall crying and lots of blood! I bet mum almost panicked!

There are a couple of other trauma-related memories but they are incomplete and not as clear as the above: losing a toenail due to a fall, losing two teeth in one day, and cutting myself everywhere after a fall into a rose hedge 🙂

A year on and I have a very vivid memory from kindergarten about learning to write! We had books containing sentences that were missing words and we had to write using slates and chalk the missing words. As the book progressed we were writing more and more of the sentence until it was just pictures that we had to describe. I expect it’s all done using computers now, and that even in the day we may have found the slates old-fashioned.

Around 1977/8 my memories start becoming much more abundant and I can easily recall specific events at primary school or during the summers of those years. Maybe I’ve lost the correct order and I’ve certainly lost fine detail, but it’s reassuring to know my memories go back over 40 years ago now.

Over 40 years… where did all that time go?