Name That Tail

First person to answer correctly wins a free dinner paid for by me! At the DQ of your choice! Some time in the near future!

This is the tail of an animal who lives in my very own home. S/he is strategically hiding under my bed (notice the lovely quilt handmade especially for me by my mom) and s/he seems to believe the adage that "out of sight, out of mind" applies completely, especially when s/he can't see you.

I have many more photos taken of my house and will post them every once in awhile until I run out. Maybe by then I will have a digital camera but I wouldn't count on it. In other news, my new/used ipod arrived today. Now I must wait a torturous three hours before I will be home and able to load music onto it. Meanwhile, I found a neat pattern for making a nano case if you're interested. I might make a few for my friends, using this link (for those who have normal-sized ipods).

I wandered around the city on Sat. and Sunday--mostly on South Street Sunday and went into this used bookstore on Bainbridge that has pretty much every book you can imagine. I reread Melanie Rae Thon's short story "First, Body" and marveled again at how she can write so convincingly when the first-person narrator is a male recovering junkie who was in 'Nam. She does it really well though. The narrator in the story works at a hospital as some low-level helper person in the ER and the rule is "first, body. Then brain." Meaning that they get the heart beating again and the guts picked up before they worry about the mind. It's a great title. I need to write something that is completely out of my sphere, just to see how it goes.

Walked through Italian Market too--the place where you can buy anything you want including live crabs, flip-flops, fresh radishes, a pig's head, disgusting gray sausages, baby dolls whose eyes roll back in their heads and little bitty turtles. I resisted all temptations which really wasn't that hard to do except I did see a neat wooden lampstand with carved pineapples on it for $6.99. Didn't buy it though. I have enough crap. Speaking of which, here is a photo of the lamp in my bedroom. I love it dearly:

I leave you with another picture, this time of the front of my house. It is quite beautiful and weedy. Please know that I do not in fact have a satellite dish. I don't know why that's there--must have belonged to the former tenant. The house to the right of me (in the picture) belongs to this skinny white woman who never cleans up the dog poop in her back square of land. It's not a problem now so much because she has vanished--been gone for about a month or more now. The newspapers are piling up on her front steps. I suppose I should pick them up? Yes, I will do that today. To the left (again in the photo) is the home of the little Mexican girl named Avery and her quiet mom and some other people. I saw her outside yesterday with a few other kids. One of the boys had his cat, Pirate, on a leash. I went over to talk for a minute. Another girl said to me about the cat, "Bravo!" and Avery whispered, "Ingles!" So I said defensively, "Yo hablo Espanol. Un poco." I think I frightened them. Avery now has a little fuzzy black dog that is stuck in the back yard and tied to a leash. I have a chair outside now so I can stand on it to lean over the wall to pet the dog every morning. She cries and whines all the time.