i am alive, it's pretty great

Dandy found (mint) gum in the trash and was carrying it around, playing with it and chewing on it.

It interests me to have been in this place for a year. The starlings were not here last spring, or maybe I don't remember well enough, or wasn't paying enough attention. This year a pair of starlings are building a nest in a crevice of the locust tree out front. Yesterday I leaned out my window and whistled with one; I could not presume we were holding any sort of conversation but I thought he might remember the noises I made and incorporate them. I just read somewhere that a study showed starlings need to sleep before they remember and repeat a sound they've heard earlier. To be honest if someone would give me an intelligent parrot I would be entertained forever. The cats and neighbors would be less entertained. Today I was hanging out my bedroom window watching the minor starling drama and an injured squirrel came out of his nest and down, his right front leg had something wrong with it and was all raw and torn open. It broke my heart but the squirrel seemed to get around okay, and could climb. It helped to know that it lives in a neighborhood where squirrels are honored; the cat-lady neighbor always puts corn and bread outside for the animals in the pine grove and every day at noon an elderly man from the old-folks' building across the street comes outside in his walker to throw treats to the squirrels. Every day the squirrels and crows anticipate him and gather. The man then scoots his way slowly back inside, looking fondly over his shoulder. I spread birdseed on the roof. Somehow, the squirrels always seem to know when I do it, because they will come and gorge on the sunflower seeds in the mix. Squirrels and I both enjoy the seeds of the sunflower, and shell them with similar efficiency. Yesterday I biked down through campus (the exotic trees gave such thrill and pleasure and I had missed them; local-born ash or cottonwood are nice but just so similar with their branches like veins thrusting upward as opposed to say a the posture of a cypress). Anyway so I was going down the bike lane and at N street a turkey ran across the road. I have no idea where that fucking turkey came from.