Jeff Watson AI Threat Level: Orange - There is a small amount of American Idol content present in this post. Proceed with caution.
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La Raymunda called me at the Place of Toil and Labor just after our weekly project status meeting broke up at 10:00.
“Do you have any idea why…”
(and right here I’m already thinking, “Uh oh…what did I do?”)
“…there is a chipped ceramic deer in our front yard?”
(Whew. She didn’t see the hookers and the crack pipes I hid in the closet. Home free!)
We have a guest living among our daffodils - a ceramic deer named Mystery Fawn. (You can see a photo of Mystery Fawn here.) I opened the garage door yesterday to go to work and as I walked around the back of La Raymunda’s car I spotted a deer sitting in the flower bed. I stopped, looked again and, realizing Mystery Fawn was ceramic, stood a while longer trying to figure out where, exactly, Mystery Fawn came from.
There is a house down the street that has been for sale for nine months or so. They have weird red bricks piled up around their trees and flower beds and fake deer standing in the backyard. No one will buy the house, even though the asking price has come down about $75,000. Apparently weird red bricks and fake deer in the backyard are the kiss of death in real estate.
But I digress.
So the only thing I could think of was that some teenage kid stole Mystery Fawn and deposited him amongst our daffodils. Why us in all of suburbia? Well, why not? “Totally random,” I told La Raymunda. She, with her extensive experience with vandalism, believed that vandals actually thought things through before they ran around smashing mailboxes and pumpkins and riding their bikes across other peoples’ lawns.
La Raymunda guesses our next door neighbor, Chris, dropped Mystery Fawn off for an unannounced visit. We had sushi with Chris and Cindy a couple of nights ago and we talked about the fake deer in the backyard down the street - and it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine Chris digging out some old garden-fawn from out of his basement and plopping it down next to our driveway in the middle of the night. This is the same man who dressed as a vampire and then harnessed himself to the ceiling of his two-story foyer with bungee cords so he could swoop down on trick-or-treaters on Halloween. A ceramic deer prank is kid’s play for Chris.
I’m coming around on the Chris O’Neill’s Wild Kingdom story myself. Chris is a perfectionist and Mystery Fawn wasn’t just cast ashore on our lawn. It’s obvious that Mystery Fawn was arranged with care, so as not to trample any flowers, aligned nicely with the sidewalk in a narrowing pinch of the flower bed with soft, chipped little eyes gazing longingly toward the northwest.
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On the marathon front, I ran ten miles on Saturday - my first day in double-digits. I learned a lot about nature’s best ambush hunters and the founding of Athens and the building of the Parthenon in the process. Did you know that mantids are nature’s best ambush hunters? They combine all four critical characteristics of an ambush hunter: skill, speed, strength and stealth. Mantids stalk the insect world as nature’s Number One ambush killing machine. True story!
My current running pace is five miles per hour, which I am trying to raise to six miles per hour this week. Also, I may have to push Marathon Day back a week or two since it looks like La Raymunda and I will be going to Mesa Verde for a week in May to celebrate our five-year anniversary.
Total mileage thus far: 86 miles.
Weight lost: 8.2 pounds (I think I’ve turned the corner on the I’m-not-losing-weight-because-I’m-gaining-muscle-and-muscle-weighs-more-than-fat theory. I’ve dropped a couple of pounds the last three days and that usually doesn’t happen except after the long Saturday runs when I lose thirty-five pounds in water weight and then gain it all back when I drink a Diet Coke. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed.)
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It’s time to torpedo the debacle that is Sanjina Malakar. I won’t even comment on the horror that was his mohawk.
~Thanks to Missus Fayne for the Sanjina album cover!~