If you’ve been reading my blog for more than a year you’ll remember we lost our beagle, Amstel, in January of last year. It’s been extremely tough not having him around. After all, Amstel was with my wife and I almost from the beginning of our lives together.
The easy choice would be to get another beagle but we decided it wouldn’t exactly be fair to the dog. We’re in this sort of limbo right now in our lives where we’re hesitant to get another dog because we have some pretty extensive traveling planned for the near future. Once our international travels are done we’ll get a camper van or RV and the new doggo will be by our vagabond sides 24/7.
So, since we can’t get another beagle right away we’ve found a compromise, squirrel therapy. We’ve been visiting the park behind our condo building since last October and feeding the squirrels walnuts. It’s such senior citizen-ish behavior but it’s been fun and it somewhat fills the void. We’ve discovered a whole cast of squirrel characters in the park— Capone (named after the gangster who always has a mean expression on his face), Mama (she had two litters of babies last year), Speck (who was the smallest squirrel we've ever seen) and the true star of the show, Magoo.
The squirrels know us so well now we only have to whistle and ten or twelve of them come running. Magoo, named after Mr. Magoo, a popular cartoon character from our childhood), is mostly blind (as you can tell from the cataracts on his eyes) and is the friendliest of the bunch.
As soon as Magoo hears my whistling he pops out of his hole in the tree and makes a beeline for us with both front paws out, feeling for the toes of our shoes so he can put himself into a prime proximity to get first dibs on the walnuts.
As silly as this sounds it’s become one of the highlights of our day. Nature never fails to impress me with its ability to heal and to teach.
I wrote about the wildly popular Rabbit R1 AI assistant a few weeks ago and am on the list to receive one later this spring. So far they’ve sold out of six batches of 10,000 of the devices, which is very impressive for a start-up.
Shortly after I placed my preorder I joined the company’s Discord channel. Many of the developers of the device are active in this Discord as well. It’s been so interesting to see how open they’ve been to listening to the feedback from their customers and integrating some of these ideas into the device before rollout. I haven’t been this excited for a new piece of tech since the first iPhone dropped in 2007. After I receive the R1, which should be in April or May, I plan on replacing my iPhone with it for a week and writing about the experience. It should be an interesting experiment.
Yet another reason to look forward to spring!
I’ve had a Medium page for almost a decade but just recently decided to start becoming active on there again. As long as Hive is still around it’ll always be my primary blog but figured a little diversification to reach different audiences isn’t a bad thing. If you’re on Medium and like my content please give me a follow on there (here’s the link).
All for now. I hope you're having an amazing start to your week. As always, thank you for reading!
~Eric Vance Walton~
(Photos and video are original. Rabbit R1 photo sourced from Rabbit.tech)
Poetry should move us, it should change us, it should glitch our brains, shift our moods to another frequency. Poetry should evoke feelings of melancholy, whimsy, it should remind us what it feels like to be in love, or cause us to think about something in a completely different way. I view poetry, and all art really, as a temporary and fragile bridge between our world and a more pure and refined one. This is a world we could bring into creation if enough of us believed in it. This book is ephemera, destined to end up forgotten, lingering on some dusty shelf or tucked away in a dark attic. Yet the words, they will live on in memory. I hope these words become a part of you, bubble up into your memory when you least expect them to and make you feel a little more alive.
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