Have you ever been unable to find an item in your house (keys, camera cable, that movie someone pressed into your hands promising you’d love it and you never watched it and now they want it back), only to rifle through your items like a B-grade detective and come across not the item in question, but the previous thing you’d given up for lost?

This happens to me all the time. Partially it speaks to the fact that there’s probably too much stuff in my 1-BR apartment (with view!), and too many areas that could be called the X of danger. As in the drawer of danger, the shelf of danger, the clear plastic box even though I’m opposed to storage solutions of danger, etc. Drawer of danger is what I like to call that catchall drawer in the kitchen where you put your carrot peeler and some weird knife accessories and the garlic press and that plastic jar-opener thing and whatever other cachibaches (like the yiddish tchotchkes, but more towards junk) you’ve got. It’s a scary place, and it’s hard to find stuff. So sometimes you can’t. But then you look again for something different, and the first thing pops up.

Which seems like it would fly in the face of the law of conservation of matter, but apparently doesn’t, or if it does, it doesn’t apply in my apartment or any place I’ve ever lived. And you?

The frustrating thing about finding your items later is that you’re still left with the desire to find the new thing. And if my experience holds true, you’ll never find it until you lose something else.

What on this wide wonderful planet does that have to do with this (sorry, cellphone) picture?

Well, I’m so glad you asked.

Many months ago, in fact maybe even more than a year ago, I was out at a birthday shindig at one of those places mentioned in the pizza post, and it was late, and public transportation was iffy and it was freezing cold and also raining, and ok, sometimes me doy el lujo de (I spoil myself by) taking a taxi. And I’d recently had a skittish taxi experience, and so was eyeing the taxis nervously, when one of this small fleet of re-upholstered taxis showed up.

And I got in, and a laughed and laughed, and cursed myself for the cruddy camera on my old phone (new one is somewhat better), and wished high and low that I would see that taxi, or another like it some time. There’s a small fleet of these, somewhere in the 12-14 range, and they drive around picking up unsuspecting (and probably unsmiling) Santiaguinos and taking them where they need to go.

Well since then, I have a list of several hundred things that I wish I’d taken pictures of, and like the lost things in the drawer, this memory was sufficiently old and rusty for it to come to the forefront. So thanks Mandi for showing up about five minutes late last night, so I could cumplir mi sueño (fulfill my dream) of snapping a shot of this beauty. Also, in case you were wondering, when I got home from my first experience with this taxi, I announced to my friend (by SMS), “I think rode a dalmation on the way home.” And she responded “te fuiste en una vaca!” (you took a cow!). Which now that I heard the mooing sound the taxi makes (this time), makes much more sense.

Take that Santiago deriders. Where’s your banyard animal taxi? And would it stop to pose for a picture? Didn’t think so. Mu po (moo, then).