Found Ourselves On a Walkabout

As the weather turns downright paradisaical here in West Seattle Vesper, Froggy, and I take a lot of long walks around our neighborhood. There are many little trails along greenbelts, a couple of ponds with plenty of shade trees and fowl, and like any good neighborhood, lots of crazy things in yards and on the street. So, to take a page from Marie's Gadabout series we decided to take the camera with us on our walks this past week, and this is what we saw.


This hideous fence is near our house. Some new folks moved in a couple of weeks before Halloween last year and proceeded to paint the fence white, then yellow and orange. We were duly impressed with their holiday spirit, until several months past and they never painted over the jack-o-lantern colors. Thankfully our cones have been burned out by the wildly vivid colors so we hardly notice it anymore.

Our next selection of pictures is a group of catholic shines. For such a notoriously "unchurched" city, there are a fair amount of such shrines on our street.



Our best guess is that this is St. Nicholas of Tolentino or St. Francis of Assisi due to the animals at the foot of the statue. Unfortunately the owners of the home are never out and about when we are so we haven't had the chance to ask them. On a less faithful note. I went up to the doorstep today to check out the flower vase since it always has lovely, fresh flowers in it. They are fake, the heathen dogs.





These are the 3 Virgin Mary statues that live on our street. Of the 3 I enjoy the colorful one in the glass case most. This is primarily because the baby Jesus doesn't look like a stunted man-god. He especially has this syndrome in the first VM picture due to his quickly receding hairline. And since I don't want to make the second VM picture feel left out, I do appreciate the fact that baby-man-Jesus is standing upon the world in his dwarf state.

Another strange trend we noticed was an absolute cornucopia of out of date holiday trappings. Keep in mind that these pictures were taken on the week preceding the 4th of July.

Harvest Greetings?

Vesper noticed that the skeleton had been on the door for so long that it had worn scratch marks into the door. How long does that take? Weeks? Months? Years?

This picture gets special notice. We have lived in our home 3 1/2 years now. According to this corner house, it has been the Lord's birthday every single one of those days. That brings some new meaning to "The Great I AM".

This poor confused home had waring factions of Christmas and St. Patrick's Day decorations.

This lump of rocks spray-painted gold got lumped into the holiday decorations because we had no idea where else to put it. The pile is as ugly and out of place as it looks. What is being attempted here?

The rest of the snaps are in categories all their own.

I'm not exactly sure what joy is found in having a little boy statue that has to go pee in your front yard.

This is a delightful front porch combination spitoon and garbage can. A lovely sentiment for all visitors to contemplate before entry.

Nothing like crawling out of a dumpster to get the blood going in the morning.

We've been debating whether or not to call the police on this homeless man. He himself seems harmless enough. He is the only person we've seen sleeping on the streets in West Seattle and whenever he is awake he is nice enough to talk to. It's his dog that is the menace. Last Sunday morning when I was walking Cole by his sleeping carcass his Boston Terrier was untied and came bolting out of nowhere and attacked Froggy. I was able to fend him off with the prodding of my feet until I was able to stare him down and scare him off. It took all of my self control to not punt that little dog.

All that's missing from this graphitti is "ANTOJC".

And what tour of a neighborhood with people of Asian heritage would complete without fake granite lion statues. If we took a picture of all of these that we had seen this post would have trebled in length.