Long time no post.

Believe it or not, we're still at it, bemusedly chronicling the state of the wall each week - what's still there (usually nothing) - what's been added (a can of corn ... a cigarette butt ... a piece of what looks like a beef bone?). Somebody added more graffiti further up the hill and the city's graffiti busters finally sandblasted it off, but they didn't go all the way down to the boat dock, so the original big graffiti, plus more recent additions, is still there.
So we soldier on, decorating the graffiti every week with angels, animals and dinosaurs. And most every week we return to find it all gone again. Mostly our unknown correspondents don't smash it any more though. Mostly it seems they throw it all in the canal. Sometimes when the water is very still and clear, we can make out the shapes resting on the mud at the bottom.

Someday I'll get my computer back up and running and put up the past year and a half (yikes!!) worth of photos documenting our weekly decorations. Such a daunting task though, I keep putting it off.

In the meantime, we are still here, we are still at it, and I keep taking the photos to document it all.

But for today, you'll just have to take my word for it.

We are experiencing technical difficulties. . .

. . . with everything . . .

please stand by

I'm working on catching up with all the missed weekly posts - I just have a hard time figuring out this camera!

Non-attachment

From the beginning, this has been an exercise in non-attachment.  It started when we found that the plastic figure of Hanuman (which we had fished out of the canal, and, on a whim, placed on one of the mutitudinous unintentional niches on the wall) had disappeared into the unknown.   We put things up, we release them to whatever happens next, we come by a week later and find them still there, or gone, or smashed in pieces on the ground.

Actually we've only found smashed pieces a few times, and not recently.  For many weeks now we've just found last week's figures vanished.

So I was a little bit bummed when after first seeing that the wall, once again, was bare (not unexpected), upon further exploration, I found about a dozen small shards of last week's angel on the ground off to the side.

My friend was more philosophical, as we have been letting these symbols go every week even as we have been putting them up on display.  But I must admit, I was a little dismayed.  I was kind of hoping the disappeared figurines were finding new homes, or keeping company with the fishes at the bottom of the canal.  Smashed shards of pottery seem so - well, so violent a response.

Ah well.  Blessings to you too, poor soul so scarred from who-knows-what experiences that you would feel the need to smash to bits a silly little piece of kitschy pottery such as last week's angel.

I gathered up the few shards I found lying on the ground and placed them in front of the original shards on the same niche we've been using all this time (smack in the middle of the graffitti that started this whole thing off).

Then we put up a new angel, and accompanying cherub.

   

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We also noticed some tiny shards of green glass on a niche lower down and to the right.

It was the remains of a wine bottle.  We found lots more green glass shards, plus the cork, on the ground next to the wall.

So much unsolved mystery here.

Were the wine bottle shards in the niche placed there deliberately, as a commentary on our angel niches?  Did the same party who smashed the wine bottle also smash last week's angel? 

Or maybe one person placed the unbroken wine bottle in a nearby niche as a witty contribution, and then a second person came along and smashed everything, showing rather lack of wit, and some grumpiness to boot. 

Did the smasher paint the grafitti?  Or was that someone else entirely?

What happened to the rest of last week's angel?  The shards we found only constitute about 20%, at most, of the total pottery piece.   

What happened to the swan?  All of the shards clearly came from the angel: none were from the swan.

So many unaswerable questions!

It's a weekly mystery!

Drizzly morning

It was drizzling when we came out this morning, so we didn't stay long.  St. Nikolaus was gone.  My friend had stopped out earlier in the week and found that someone had moved him from the center of the wall to the far edge, almost hidden in the bushes, and with his back turned to the boat landing, but he was completely gone this morning.

We put up a sweetly silly angel and a graceful swan:

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These things still haven't bloomed:

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But this one has:

Beautiful, isn't it?  I have no idea what it is. It's very tall.

Unflooded

We put up something fun for August..

It's St. Nikolaus, the Bavarian version.  We can all use some unexpected gifts,

any time of year, can't we?

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This week's nature shots:

The boat landing, unflooded.

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The canal.

The dark smudges are a combination of leftover flood mud, together with goose and duck poop.  Charming!

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Wondering what this will bloom into next week.

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Chicory blooming amidst some unidentified wild relative of the carrot family.

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All in all, it was a lovely day.

Flood

We got 7 inches of rain Friday night.  When we arrived at the wall, the path and the boat landing were still a foot deep in floodwater.

We could see from where we stood that our trio of figurines from last week had vanished.  But not having had the foresight to bring our galoshes, we just took photos, watched a big snapping turtle swim leisurely over the boat landing (neither of us were quick enough with our cameras to get a photo of that), communed with Nature, and left. 

From the traces of mud left on the tall wildflowers, it appeared that the canal had risen an incredible 4 or 5 feet over its usual level.  It was down quite a bit from the high-water mark by the time we got there Sunday morning, but you can see from the line of driftwood across the path how high the water had risen.

It was amazing!