I Am (Not) Straight

I've been writing a lot lately and you're probably sick of my whining and grumbling, so how about another post of miscellaneous photos? These have stacked up over the past several weeks, so -- enjoy!

First, this little Christmas/Thanksgiving cactus lives in our library. It's a cutting from one of mine, which in turn came from cuttings from the parent plant, which lives in the library! So this little one has come to live with its grandparent.

I was just impressed that it cranked out a flower, being so small.

I love this time of year because tree shadows become very dramatic.

Falling leaves can also make interesting impressions, in this case in the grime on someone's car.

This was the lid on our ice cream the other night. I pulled it off the carton, set it upside down on the counter, and saw that little face staring back at me! The tendency to see faces in inanimate objects is known as pareidolia. Psychologists suspect it's a side effect of our human ability to quickly recognize moods and danger from the faces of other people. In other words, we're highly sensitized to faces and, by extension, face-shaped objects.

Not your typical autumn leaf. Someone's craft project gone wrong, maybe?

Methinks thou doth protest too much!

I could not resist yet another picture of the ever-growing and -changing pile of garbage on the next street over. Garbage stacks up on this corner like nobody's business. I reported it to our local garbage collectors via the "Love Clean Streets" app -- which I can use to alert the garbage guys to refuse on the sidewalks -- but they didn't promptly collect it. They said it would be picked up on the regular collection day. So then I sent a picture to our local councillors and asked why this situation couldn't be handled better. Why don't the residents of this corner have a bin for their garbage?

(Which is what that graffiti on the wall behind the trash pile says -- "Buy some bins, filthy gits!")

And finally, here's Olga, passing the sad citrus tree I wrote about yesterday. You can't see the pot because it's too close to the wall, but the leaves are visible just to the right of Olga, below that dried hydrangea. My plant app says it's a mandarin orange (which Wikipedia notes is "tender and damaged easily by cold").

So, funny thing -- after I returned the tree, whoever owns it moved it closer to the wall, making it more accessible to passersby on the street. Do you think that's an invitation to take it?