The cardinals in our neighborhood are very shy. I’ve been patiently chasing them, and finally got a picture or two of the male. We played this circling, chase game around the trees in the backyard. After a bit I changed the rules and went under the tree. He didn’t expect that.
Tried to get some work done on the car today, but the shop I visited had a slight problem with a key machine this morning. The guy said the repair man was coming at noon. I left my number and asked him to call me when the machine was fixed so that he may hoist my car onto it.
Because, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from amusement parks and forgotten to extrapolate to the rest of our lives, you’d rather not be the first person up on the freshly repaired equipment.
So I went to a giant antique store. I’m saving that story for the weekend. I walked the whole place, no phone call. After an amount of time that is surely beyond what it should take to fix one machine, the mechanics of which I know nothing about, I returned to the shop. The repair guy hadn’t yet showed up. So I called it an afternoon.
That was the temperature when we went out for dinner. In other news, this is August, but still. We had dinner at Cheeburger Cheeburger, which is a place that The Yankee and I have never enjoyed together. There were two in Birmingham, for a time, but we have no memory of a mutual visit. So this is a new experience. This is also new:
Cheeburger has always displayed the Polaroids of the hungry people who’ve eaten their one-pound burger (I’ve never tried). Previously the pictures covered the walls like a wallpaper, which was an interesting expression of growth, much like a celluloid bacteria. Haven’t visited in a while? Oh the pictures have expanded around the corner and down the baseboard. That sort of thing.
The last time I was here they were moving up to the ceiling. The surrounded-by-people-promoting-their-new-metabolic-problem atmosphere was a terrific exhibition. You couldn’t help but staring at the faces and the little notes people left behind. I understand why they went to the stacks, for space concerns, but this new display method ruins the point. You don’t want to look through pictures in stacks like that. It would feel like too much work, or feel too intrusive. So you just see the stacks on the wall and go about your meal.
I wonder when they finally make the decision to throw away some of the old pictures. Maybe they have a little ceremony.
We drove around until we found a field on a quiet country road where we could see the night’s festivities. I always oversell the Perseids in my mind. One of the astronomers on the Samford faculty sent us a note where he mentioned that some experts were expecting up to 100 visible meteorites per hour if you got in a good spot. I’ve learned to temper my expectations — I want 100 a minute, like some sort of movie theater intro film — but still haven’t learned to forget taking pictures of the event. This is the one I got.
The background are actually stars I shot tonight. I caught no Perseid meteorites on my camera (The Yankee got TWO!) but we saw several and had a great time, sitting in the dark and quiet and heat of the evening. My best picture of the night:
The plane! The plane!@
