two weird things

Everything's coming in twos these days, eh? Just a coincidence.

Basically, nothing lately has been interesting enough to talk about, so I'll throw out these random occurrences as an excuse to blog.

On Sunday morning, as we wended our way down the street on the way to church, we saw a sight I have never beheld in a residential neighborhood before. Granted, neither have I ever seen a turtle crossing a residential street, and we saw that on our street a couple of months ago. That's one thing we love about our neighborhood -- its proximity to some wild spaces. Even if the space does surround a golf course.

So Sunday -- in the distance of about, oh, a dozen houses down from us, we saw two birds picking at roadkill. Not too unexpected, until I registered their size (huge) and their bare heads. They were VULTURES.* By the time we got back from church, they had either carried off most of the remains, or someone did an incredibly bad job at cleaning up the mess.

The second odd thing happened yesterday morning, on my way to work. I wasn't having a good morning, so rationalized that I needed an iced coffee pick-me-up. It doesn't take much to reach this rationalization, granted. As I entered the McDonald's about a half-block from my downtown office, I noticed an eccentric old man chortling to himself at a table right near the door. On my way out the door, he grinned at me and offered me a dollar. That's right -- he offered ME a dollar. How pathetic must I have looked that day?
(and, no, I did not take it. The man had a bottle of baby oil on the table in front of him. I had no idea where that dollar had been, people, and I don't want to know.)


* I fully expect to hear from SuperSam, our outdoor guru neighbor and friend, that they must've been 'American black vulture' or some similarly specific thing, and he's seen incidences like that at least 20 times since he's lived there. This happened pretty much right outside their house, but they were gone for the weekend, so they couldn't 'admire' it for themselves. The victim appeared to be a rabbit, but if it turns out it was one of their cats, I will die a thousand horrified deaths for mentioning it at all.