Zorro was in the woods

Today, and also a couple of Sundays ago, I did a little shooting, nature walking and photographing. I'm not very good at any of them, but I still have fun.

I didn't take the time to adjust the images, so they'll show up pretty small.


Also, it turns out that the pics I upload go to the top, so instead of seeing the "Z" that was just a stick when you clicked on my blog, you saw a picture of Rocky Mountain Oysters. It's sort of funnier that way so I'm going to leave it. And I realize it's going to take a lot of work to finish this post. So, here we go!

This is some type of burrow or den. I don't know what kind of animal it belongs to because I'm not the outdoorsman I fancy myself to be. Also I didn't feel like sticking my hand in to find out. The entrance is the black spot at bottom left center.


"Feed me, Seymour, I want some blood!" I took three barbs from this cactus to my hand while taking the picture. Audrey got some blood. Those fuckers hurt when you pull them out.


These are called mortars. They were used by early Irish settlers in the mountains of California. On Saturday afternoon (or morning), a man would buy three of his closest friends a pint of beer. This pint was a type of downpayment called a "drowsy" (not to be confused with the costly and foreign tradition of a "dowry" which is the money, land and goods given to a man to take an undesirable woman as his wife: see bribe). The "drowsy" ensured that if you passed out, your three friends would drag you to the rock and each would pour a third of a pint of beer into a hole in the rock. Upon waking, you would have beer within easy reach to quench your thirst and refresh your spirits, enabling you to stand up and get back to business. The holes in the rock were usually round; thus, buying a drowsy was often referred to as buying a "round."


This is another critter condo. I really ought to find out what makes these. They're all over the place right now. I'm thinking Body Snatchers.


So now that you've seen my photographic genius at work, I was going to start a story about Friday afternoon. But I think that not all of you have read about Thursday Afternoon, so I'm going to post that and make this one of the longest blogs ever. I know, you might not like reading a whole story on the computer screen... I don't either. I was going to put a link to Word file so you could just print it out and read at your leisure, but Putfile is stupid and I don't have any other ideas of where to put it at the moment. So copy and paste if you like - it's pretty short.

Thursday Afternoon

I’ve got it this time, boy. I really have. This is the one I’ve been waiting for.

I was sitting around in my underwear this afternoon, like I sometimes do on Thursdays, and thinking about what I would do if I could time travel, like I sometimes do on most days. It makes perfect sense that they’re going to have time travel one of these times, you know, because they pretty much have come up with everything that’s ever been in a movie or one of those old-timey books, like rockets and fake legs and quantum physics. They have all those things now, but a long time ago you never would have guessed it, unless you were the guy writing all the crazy books about rockets, I guess. So I was reading the newspaper this afternoon and there was a story about expensive booze, like whiskeys and rums and wine that was a hundred dollars or more for a bottle. Like this one bottle of wine that was from a winery that burned down about 50 years ago because the guy’s brother who owned the winery was mad at him for stealing his recipe, and they were always at each other like most brothers are and so he set the brother’s winery on fire. Anyway, it all burned up, or burned down maybe, and only 6 bottles of wine survived the fire way down in the cellar and one of them was for sale for about a hundred thousand dollars. I was wondering how often people sell their bottles of wine and booze that cost that much, like if you had a cocktail party, you know, and tons of other rich people came and you were showing off your hundred-thousand-dollar bottle of wine and somebody said “Oh, that old thing, I had that five years ago. I sold it for fifty grand to some sucker in Florida. When did you get it?” and then the rest of your party would be a real drag.

After I thought about all that stuff I’m back to thinking about time travel, and how if I could time travel I could go back to right before the fire and steal a few bottles of that wine. Maybe steal a whole case, and then sneak in after the fire and break any that were left so that I’d have all the surviving bottles. I could sell one right away, you know, and say it was the only bottle that survived and make quite a bit of money even though it was fifty years ago. But I don’t know if I would be able to take money or anything with me – in some of the movies you have to time travel naked because nothing inorganic can time travel. So I might have to hide it somewhere so I could get it later. Let’s see, if I was going to hide something fifty years ago where it would stay there until now, where would I put it? I started looking around my apartment. I saw a movie once where someone in the past stuck something under a floorboard so the person in the future could find it, like it’d just been sitting there all along even though it just happened. Sort of. So I looked around but I didn’t really have floorboards. I was unscrewing the air conditioning vent when I realized that my apartment just got built like three years before I moved in. I knew it was three years because I asked the manager when they were going to put water in the pool, and he said it takes five years to get the permit, and that it had only been three so I should wait two more. What a rip-off. They used to always keep the cover on the pool and the gate was locked with a sign that said the pool was closed for repairs. Well one night, a week after I moved in, this kid climbed the fence and did a cannonball into the pool, right through the cover, and smashed on the cement about ten feet down. So then they had to leave the cover off and paint the edge yellow, and also put razor wire on top of the pool fence so that nobody would really want to go in there even if they put water in it. That was when we all found out that the picture in the brochure was actually of a pool at another place across town. It was a nice-looking pool.

After I thought about the pool, I started thinking about other places besides my apartment where I could hide a lot of money. Or, even better, cash all the money in for gold and just hide a pile of gold so it wouldn’t get all wrecked by getting wet or anything. Also if it was thousands of dollars, the gold would be easier to hide in a small box or something. So I went online and found out that fifty years ago gold cost about forty dollars an ounce, but today it’s almost nine hundred! This is the part that just about made me shit myself. If I sold one bottle of that wine in the fifties for even a thousand bucks I could buy 25 ounces of gold and hide it. Today that would be worth over twenty grand. So then I go back in time again to the early seventies where it was still only about fifty dollars an ounce and say “hey, remember that winery that burned down twenty years ago? My grandfather left me five bottles of that wine in his will and I don’t drink wine! Who wants it?” and then I sell them for at least five grand apiece and buy 500 more ounces of gold to hide. And then I come to today and that gold is worth about half a million bucks! Plus I could have hidden the rest of the wine, and I could sell another bottle for another hundred grand, and then, shit, I could invite some friends over to drink a bottle from the case I’d still have, and it would be really old and really expensive and we could take a picture of ourselves drinking it and send it to those rappers who think they’re real hot shit because they drink a thousand-dollar bottle of champagne when they’re getting crunked at the club. And then we could take a picture of me spitting the wine out on one of their cds and laughing! And then if I wrecked my cd I could just buy a new one because I’d be pretty rich.

After I thought about spitting all that wine I went outside to look for a good hiding place for five hundred ounces of gold and a case of old wine. It was all apartments though so I went downtown and a lot of the buildings were older than fifty years, but I couldn’t think of one good place in any of them that only I would be able to get to in all that time. Where else could I hide it? It would probably have to be out in the desert or something, like those guys from the Twilight Zone who stole a lot of gold bars and then put themselves into a coma for a hundred years so they could wake up and spend it without anyone remembering it was them who robbed the bank. There wasn’t a desert very close so I was about to drive to the mountains about an hour out of town and I was thinking about how one guy died in the coma because a rock fell on his little glass coma-coffin and let all the gas out that was keeping him alive. Then the other three guys fought each other for the gold and when the last one finally died it turned out that gold wasn’t even worth anything in the future. I thought about all the things that could happen in the mountains in fifty years, like earthquakes and rockslides and fires – it would be pretty risky. What about stocks, though? What if I bought stocks instead of gold? Then I could just have an account with all my dividends being reinvested for fifty years in companies that I knew would make a killing. That way, I could just go start pulling money out right now. But how would I tell myself where to get it? It started to get pretty confusing so I decided to stick with the gold plan. Just then I remembered that my friend lived in a house that was built in the 1920s, I remembered because one time we found this really old photograph of a woman with her shirt off stuck behind a beam in the basement. I asked him who used to live here and he said his grandfather and great-grandfather had built it in the 1920s and their family had lived there ever since. He said maybe the picture was his grandpa’s, and I said maybe the girl in the picture was his grandma and he hauled off and slugged me right in the face, even though he said he meant to hit me in the shoulder.

After I thought about getting slugged in the face, I went over to my friend’s house to see what he was doing. I pretended to go to the bathroom but I was actually looking around for somewhere that I could hide gold and wine. It might be hard to sneak into his house fifty years ago when I didn’t really know his family yet, so I went outside and started nosing around the backyard. I was lifting up the doghouse when my friend came out and asked what the hell I was doing. Now that he was all suspicious of me it was going to be hard to look around for where I might have buried the stuff, so I told him my plan. I figured I could cut him in for a little bit, I would just have to remember to bury part of the gold in one place along with a map that only I could read to show me where the rest was. I was looking at the fence along the back yard, wondering how old it was, and my friend was just standing there staring at me. “What about right here?” I yelled to him. “I bet this funny design on the board was here fifty years ago. Or what about over there by the door to the cellar? That’s cement, it’s been there forever and it would be easy to find. Or what about right in front of this tree? I bet it was a lot smaller fifty years ago, but it would be a good landmark.” But my friend had already turned to go back in the house. He was shaking his head and mumbling a little bit, and I think I heard the word “crazy.” Then out of the corner of my eye I noticed the whole tree that I was standing by move about half an inch to the left. The whole tree! It was really something else, not something you see very often. So I got down and started digging around the roots right in front. At first I was using my hands, but I figured I would have buried it deeper so nobody found it on accident, so I started using this old shovel which was leaning against the fence behind the tree. I wasn’t finding anything and I could see my friend’s mom watching me through the kitchen window. I was just thinking I should pick a different spot, maybe along the side of the house where the old cars were sitting when I hit something hard. I got down and pulled out this old, dirty box. I wiped it off a little and opened it up. There was a single piece of paper in there, so I turned it over and read “Make up your damn mind already.”