Pam commented about the alleys in my neighborhood. Most of Denver has them, and I like them a lot. For one thing, it means that streetscapes are not garage-centric, as you see in many suburbs. The houses look more welcoming, with porches and walkways and gardens instead of vast expanses of driveway concrete and big, blank garage doors. (Did you know that snout houses are banned in Portland?)The Dumpsters in the alleys are very convenient. You never have to remember when trash day is, and if you're out walking the dog, poop bag disposal is always handy.
The alleys do attract scavengers, both human and animal. If you have an item to get rid of that may still be useful, you can put it next to the Dumpster and someone will take it.
As you can see from the picture above, the squirrels are always Dumpster-diving. That one found a big hunk of chocolate cake.
And speaking of squirrels, I finally broke down and squirreled away the last two years of photos on my external hard drive. I had more than 10,000 photos, and the laptop was slowing down because of it.
While iPhoto is convenient and easy to use, it has one big flaw: It has no means of archiving just a portion of your photos. You can't move, say, last year's pics to another drive and free up space. You have to archive the whole damn library and start a new library from scratch. So I've just done that, and I'm kicking myself for not naming the photo rolls in more detail. It'll be a bitch to find things if I don't know the exact date. But the laptop should be speedier now.
I hate how garage-centric suberbs are. I would dearly love a little walkway and porch!
ReplyDeleteThat is one big squirrel. It's bigger than most celebu-dogs.
ReplyDeleteDuck, I suppose it's possible to add both of those, provided you don't live somewhere with covenants that prohibit them.
ReplyDeleteBetts, probably just the angle. It was a pretty average-sized squirrel. Though bound to get fatter with all that cake.