Why am I flinching?

I do love a good webcam. Some of my favourites are:
Eagle nests from around southern BC
Bruichladdich scotch distiller in Scotland
Tofino webcam from a wonderful resort on Vancouver Island

It's nice to see people making great scotch - some of my favourite scotch is made at Bruichladdich. And it's great to watch eagles in their nests feeding baby eagles... although it can get nerve racking at the end of the season when you just want that last young bird to leave the nest and fly already!

My most frequent view is the Tofino webcam - a fabulous beach in the most relaxed place in Canada. But yesterday I was alarmed by what I saw. It was black and covered the picture... was it apocalypse? was the camera in jeopardy? No, it was a bird. A bird tail actually. A big black bird tail that looked frightening on my computer screen! It may have been from a crow, or a raven (known as the trickster bird so a likely candidate) but I think it was a bit small for an eagle (I've been close to one in flight by the water's edge - they are bigger than me).

I can giggle at it now... but it made me flinch when I first saw it. A link to an outside reality that felt a bit too close to home for a second!

I may need to get out more.

Where was this screw supposed to be?

Why is it that every time you take something apart, and then put it back together again, there is always an extra piece?

Frequently a washer, often a screw, sometimes a piece of metal or plastic that honestly doesn't look like it was part of the thing you just took apart. There is always something left over.

But the most confusing thing is that the item that was was taken apart, and then put back together, works again. So did it really need the left over bit? Was that left over part really necessary? Did it really come from the item in the first place?

If there are parallel dimensions, is there one where something is lost every time an item is taken apart and then put back together? Is this left over screw from that dimension?

Is this the key to traveling to another dimension? Become an integral part of a mechanism, wait for it to break down, and then escape to a new world when someone takes it apart to fix it? Actually, no, that would only be from the other dimension to ours. It's our dimension where the extra pieces appear. So is this where aliens come from? Did someone in a parallel dimension already have this idea, and they managed to jump to ours using this scheme?

Is this an alien screw from another dimension?

Do mattresses have a herding instinct?

You aren't supposed to do it. It's littering. It's illegal. But most people don't know how to get rid of old mattresses, so they go out in the middle of the night, find an alley, and dump them.

But that's not the end of it. When you have one mattress... there will be more very soon.

The empty lot beside our home now has 3 mattresses dumped in it.

We saw the same thing happen in the alley behind our old appartment building.

The empty lot beside our home contained dilapidated old buildings for about a year until we made enough noise to have the city force the owner to tear the buildings down. The chances of the owner of the empty lot doing anything about the mattresses are slim to none.

So now we have a look each morning to see if there are more mattresses. It's like they have a herding instinct. Stray mattresses will find each other.

Update March 15: How much do soaking wet mattresses weigh?

They are gone! Hooray! There was a very loud truck outside yesterday. It was out there for quite a while making quite the noise. When it was gone.... so were the mattresses!

It's been raining here for... um... months. Yep, not exaggerating... too much. So the mattresses that were sitting outside for days had to have been soaking wet. That would be heavy. No wonder the truck was making so much noise.

So the rubble from the dilapidated buildings has been removed, the herd of mattresses has left the watering hole and moved on to greener pastures... if an archaeologist dug up the site in a hundred years, would they find the remains of bed bugs and deduce that the shops were actually a human dwelling?

This vacant lot is getting interesting. I wonder what's going to be out there next.