jaunthie | Minutiae

A few more notes from this weekend:

Crows are smart birds, and juvenile crows are positively geniuses at finding ways to amuse themselves. Coming out from the grocery store after shopping for Sunday's dinner ingredients, fisherbear and I were wearily annoyed to hear someone's car alarm start sounding off in the parking lot. We looked around, and realized that two juvenile crows were sitting on top of the car in question, looking entirely pleased with themselves, while a number of other juveniles were looking at them in admiration and bouncing up and down on the rooftops of other cars in the lot. When the car owner (more responsible than 99% of those with car alarms) came hustling out of the store and shut off the alarm, the crows on top of the car fluttered away - but as soon as he was gone, they flew back and dropped heavily onto the car roof again, obviously hoping to re-trigger the noise and light show. I was highly amused at the innovation of car-alarm triggering as the local sport for the young crows in the neighborhood.

We had two storms blow through on successive evenings. Stormlight at evening can turn the darndest colors. Saturday night, the stormlight was green, like someone had put a giant green gobo over the entire landscape. Sunday night, the gobo was magenta. Both times, it was really, really weird and yet strangely beautiful.

It's always an interesting experience when we get a new barista at one of my usual coffee haunts. Most of the time I'm lucky and one of the others will have warned/trained the newbie about the crazy customer who asks for cinnamon to be added to the espresso grounds before the shot is pulled. Every so often, though, like this morning, I'll encounter someone who hasn't been warned ahead of time. Explaining it is always a bit of a challenge, particularly when English is the second or third language. The lady this morning did an admirable job of pulling the shot once I did explain, though - it's one of the better mochas I've had at work.

It took a while to make it through the delays in the site, but I became the 1,363rd person to sign up for NaNoWriMo from my region so far. Sign-ups are only allowed in the month of October. That's kind of impressively scary. And of course even scarier is the fact that I have given my rational brain the boot and committed to writing a novel in November.