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Julia, my food frakking deputy, and I spent last Christmas in New York. Well, technically it was Boxing Day in New York City, and Christmas in Connecticut, but I feel it was a reasonably iconic way to spend the holiday nonetheless.

We had a very interesting walking tour of Midtown Manhattan from an actual native, so of course we had to go by Rockefeller Plaza. It was the day after Christmas, so the place was a madhouse, virtually should-to-shoulder humanity. And presiding over it all, looking down at the swarms of ice skaters was the Christmas tree.

Julia can confirm that I wondered out loud how they got the tree into the city. The Rockefeller Plaza Christmas tree was about as wide as three lanes of traffic. It was definitely too big to come into the city by truck. There was simply no way that a tree that big could have the branches tied back far enough to get through Manhattan traffic, the toll booths on the bridges, etc. And it was, looking at it, a perfectly formed, perfectly conical tree, not something that had been battered by a lot of limb-tying.

My initial thought was they must use a helicopter, but that seemed dangerous and ridiculously over-the-top even by New York standards.

Yes, that’s right, I’m a country boy at heart. Take me to the Big Apple and I mainly think about the trees.

It wasn’t until we went to the Manhattan public library that I got a chance to look closely at one of these big-city trees. Behind the library they had a Christmas fair with a tree that could be the twin of the tree at Rockefeller Plaza. The crowds were thinner, so I could get right up close to the tree, and actually look through the branches to the horrible lie within.

The truth is, there are no giant, perfectly formed trees in Manhattan on Christmas. They chainsawed all the branches off these trees, trucked them into the city, and then tied the branches back onto the trunk. That’s why the trees make a perfect cone, which actual conifers do not actually do in the wild. It’s just a sculpted heap of rope, nails, and dead tree.

Sure, I can dig how the ritualized slaughter of an evergreen tree represents the rebirth of life in the middle of winter in a Germanic paganistic sort of way. But do you really have to mutilate the tree too?

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Here for instance is the Rio Grande as seen from the road between Lajitas and Presidio. I somehow angled the camera so that the image looks sideways no matter what the orientation.

By the way, Presidio? Not all that it’s cracked up to be.

Here’s a picture of some mountains, taken during the ten minutes in which Texas is beautiful. And when I say “mountains” I really mean what passes for mountains in Texas: big piles of naked dirt. Considering this is Terlingua, they may actually be tailings from a mercury mine.

The place where we stayed had a lot of debris just lying around.

Here’s some piles of rock:

But I did get some relaxation in.
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I caught a picture of the train as it barreled through the SXSW crowds one Saturday afternoon.

I think this is the only picture I took during SXSW.

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The Car2Go car share service has added a couple of electric vehicles to its fleet. I’d been seeing them around town, but it was a while before I passed one that was available for rent. I didn’t particularly need to use the service at the time, but how could I pass by an electric vehicle and not try it out?

The performance wasn’t that much different from the normal tiny car experience. I had the window rolled down, so I could hear the whispering whine of its little motors responding to my slightly demanding calls for more acceleration.

After about fifteen dollars of joy riding I left it at the curb.

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Austin has had some spring rains, and with that comes the renewal of life and stuff. I was helping a friend put away some trash on his porch, and we found a chameleon hiding in a crumpled piece of butcher paper. I tried to catch it, but it immediately jumped onto my shirt. Don’t worry, the lizard survived without any problems, he didn’t even lose his tail.

I was impressed with the speed in which he changed from the brown of the butcher paper to the bright green that largely failed to match the color of my shirt. It couldn’t have taken him more than twenty seconds. And when he fell on the ground an took shelter behind a bicycle tire, he returned to a brown colors just as quickly.

Then last night some friends were hanging out on our porch late at night. The evenings are still cool around here. And then we had a visit from a giant moth making a spastic leap at the porch light. It repeatedly fluttered against the backs of necks, or buzzed the tender flesh around ears and throat.

I had to grab it and carry it to someone else’s porchlight. The light on the porch was dim, so the photo doesn’t do the beauty of its feather wings justice. It felt a little like a baby bird in the palm of my hand, soft and furry and maybe just a bit warm.

I found myself stroking its wings and singing the Mothra song.

And yes, I know the Mothra song.

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I saw this house on the south side, just a little further south than the nice parts of Travis Heights. It seems like a perfectly ordinary, and even dull, cinderblock house. But someone seems to have gone wild with the paint.

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