This was quite a weekend, but before I get to any of that, I must mention the most bizarre moment of the past 48 hours. Saturday morning (er, afternoon), I was hanging out with the guys from the Makebelieves (they stayed at our house after their Glasslands show), and Al mentioned "What's with your neighbors and their big bird?" He directed me out to the back yard where, 2 yards over, there sat one ring-necked pheasant. Yeah, that's right. A pheasant. Whaa?
Sadly, my stupid camera's batteries were dead and we had no spares around the house (Incidentally, this makes me want to go on a long rant about how it's pissing me off that bodegas constantly sell mostly-dead batteries to me), but you must believe me that inside the chain-link fenced yard, strewn with garbage and renovation debris, a lovely example of this game bird strode about like he owned the joint. A stray cat was in the next yard, eying said bird with great attention. Reportedly, the cat had been in the yard but was actually chased away by the pheasant, which was somewhat larger than the cat.
According to my research though, this is not all that strange. Pheasants are all over the boro, and because nobody is really hunting them, they get along just fine. Still, there's something just plain odd about seeing such an animal in this environment.
February 5, 2007 – 12:19 pm
Looks like Sylvie's here to stay. She and Buzz got hitched at the fabulous Brooklyn Municipal Building over the weekend and then had a reception at home. I took a few photos of the ceremony and forgot all about the camera until they got to the cake-cutting (which I also missed, I only got one odd pic of Buzz waving a cake spatula around).
This was the new house's first party, so far it seemed to weather the storm well. Despite the rain, the wedded couple made good on their promise to break a whole bunch of plates in the back yard. Apparently this is some sort of wedding tradition (gimme a wineglass carefully folded into a napkin, thank you). I don't have any photos of this, but I'm pretty sure somebody got some footage, so I'll link to it when it becomes available.
Ironically, our yard has already been the site of a similar celebration: before the party, I had to go out and sweep up a number of glass bottles that had been lobbed onto our property. I wasn't sure where the bottles came from or if our yard specifically was being targeted, but I hoped it was just mindless littering. But after the plate-throwing cacophony ended, just as the last people returned inside, a St. Ides bottle came out of the sky, landing squarely on the patio. I'm almost certain it came from the house next door, probably from the top floor. Now I'm not sure how to fight back, aside from leaving the broken crockery out there as a symbol that we really don't give a damn, but at some point I will want to spend time in that yard, and I don't wanna have to wear a helmet. I'm thinking of getting an air rifle, but perhaps that may just exacerbate the animosity. Wait till they get a load of band practice.
This was quite a weekend, but before I get to any of that, I must mention the most bizarre moment of the past 48 hours. Saturday morning (er, afternoon), I was hanging out with the guys from the Makebelieves (they stayed at our house after their Glasslands show), and Al mentioned "What's with your neighbors and their big bird?" He directed me out to the back yard where, 2 yards over, there sat one ring-necked pheasant. Yeah, that's right. A pheasant. Whaa?
