Mad Dogs & Englishmen


“Crappy bikes make Baby Jesus cry”

Mad Dogs & Englishmen is a Monterey area bicycle store chain. The pictured location is in Carmel. As bike shops go, it is one of the best that I have seen. We have rented bikes from them many times in the past. Once, they rented us really nice ones, instead of their usual crappy rental fare, in the hope that we would then buy them, but it was not to be. We had used their Monterey location for this. Taking off from downtown Monterey, we would ride along the coast, around the peninsula, through Pacific Grove, to Pebble Beach and back. Pictured are two bicycles. The pink one has a sidecar, which are usually employed to cart small dogs. The other bike sports a surfboard rack. I later saw a bike with this kind of rack being employed down the hill, by Carmel beach.

New Neighbors

Robins Nest Outside Our Bedroom

According to T. S. Elliot, April is supposed to be the cruelest month, but not around here. Instead of baby birds being plucked too soon, we seem to have a bumper crop. It started with the Mouning doves. They traditionally roost on our southside neighbor’s house and as is their like, mournfully call to us from there. This has been the situation for years. This year though, they seemed to have jumped the driveway and our now roosting on our house. This morning, I spied two doves on our dining room windowsill and while lying on the living room couch, I could hear them calling. I suspected that they are nesting either on the real chimney or the fake chimney, both of which are at the front of the house. Both masonry structures are too tall to see what is happening on top of them, but such lofty perches also seem too exposed to hawks. According to Wiki, Mourning doves are known for building very flimsy, minimalist nests made of twigs and grass, typically completed in few days. They often nest in trees, shrubs, or on human structures like gutters, with both parents sharing incubation (male by day, female by night) and raising multiple broods per season. I still have not located their nest, but while looking for it, I easily found the pictured Robin’s nest, at the back of the house, where breakfast is served all day long.

Dital Harp

Dital Harp

Edward Light designed and marketed several novel string instruments during the early 19th century. Patented in 1816, the dital harp has a thumb-operated key mechanism that allows the player to raise the pitch of each string a half step by pressing on buttons (so-called ditals) on the back of the instrument. Derived from the Italian word dito (finger), a dital is a key that, when pressed, draws a string down against a fret to change its pitch. Like most of Light’s creations, this instrument is varnished a dark color to contrast its gold-colored decoration.