Birds

Yesterday evening S and I went running together. This was a first, as normally S prefers going to the gym over taking a run around the neighborhood; plus, he's naturally a faster runner than me, so we hadn't ever explored the idea of becoming running partners. On a whim yesterday evening, though, I called S from work and asked if he might want to join me on my usual three-mile loop, and he agreed!

So we took off around 7:30, and to my surprise, S was able to jog at a very slow pace in order to stay alongside me. Because I tend to pant heavily when I run (insert lewd joke here), I told S as soon as we started that this might be his first chance ever in the history of our relationship to talk freely and at length without my interjecting comments and opinions the whole time. Hee. He actually grinned at the idea of rambling on uninterrupted, so off he went, regaling me with stories about work for the first 15 minutes or so of our run.

Once we turned off the main road and entered our friend JP's neighborhood, we passed many cute cats. Cute cats that seem to understand that hanging out beneath cars or in the center of the road is not advantageous to their health, unlike our local scrappy outdoor feline, Hip-Hop, who disregards all personal-safety concerns whatsoever. The cats we passed were all hanging out on front lawns or on the edge of the sidewalk, watching us as we ran by.

On the way out of JP's neighborhood, we ran beneath a huge, circling, shrieking cloud of crows, which was freaky. Crows (or ravens, or starlings---I'm not sure which) do this, as I learned in my first apartment in Maryland a few years back. There, we had a problem whereupon several hundred crows (or some other similar-looking, scary black birds) would circle two large trees by our parking lot, shrieking and crapping all the while. They would fly around and shriek and be generally creepy for a few hours, then they'd finally settle in the branches of those two trees and quiet down a bit. Those trees, with all the black birds on them, looked like something out of a nightmare. The problems with this situation were many: For starters, the birds would circle and shriek early in the morning, beginning at 5:00 a.m. or so. The sound was deafening and very disconcerting. Secondly, a few hundred birds crapping in our parking lot was bad news. You should've seen the cars. They were COATED. So was the ground. You had to watch your step the entire way. Plus, that much crap smells bad. Kind of musty. It was a problem, and unsanitary. Finally, the city sent someone over to attempt to scare the birds away for good. He started by using various loud devices: whistles and clapping things. That didn't really work. He then graduated to mini-explosives. That worked, a bit. Finally, he used a rifle to shoot blanks into the air, over and over, thereby rendering the birds too terrified to stick around. Eureka! Problem solved.

Anyway, we passed beneath the birds last night, and one peed on me. Not as much as when I got peed on by a bird on Melrose one time, but still. There was a guy in his front yard waving a newspaper at the birds (totally ineffective) and generally cursing them, and I shouted, "One peed on me!" I'm not sure why I yelled that. But he was sympathetic and shook his head with what looked like bitterness, as if to say, "These damn birds are a nuisance!"

It's interesting how some birds are frightening and loud and ugly (pigeons, crows, vultures, the more-aggressive seagulls), while others are adorable and pretty and lovely singers (finches, cardinals, nightingales).

When we finally got back home, I iced my calf with that same bag of Peruvian scallops and popped some Advil, which is now becoming my usual routine. We then settled in for a night of "Amazing Race" viewing and Jonathan Ames reading.