A Skiing Flamingo

I restocked the bird feeders yesterday morning and the parakeets and starlings were on the suet balls within minutes. In fact, I don't think I made it back inside before they showed up. Maybe it's hard to find food at this time of year. Anyway, I saw six parakeets on the feeder at once, which might be an all time record.

They're quite aggressive with each other and there's always a lot of snapping and jockeying for position. The one above kept nipping the tailfeathers of one of its pals, and held on even when the other bird took flight! Fortunately it promptly let go and the feather didn't come out.

In mid-morning I made a rare trip to the post office to mail a letter. I haven't used snail mail in an age and didn't have a stamp -- didn't even know how much one would cost, to be honest. Fortunately that problem was easily solved with some spare change retrieved from our dusty coin bowl.

There was some kind of holiday market on West End Green and I briefly wandered through, but I'm not really buying gifts this year so I didn't purchase anything. I did, however, stop in at the plant shop to buy...

...a wreath for our front door. Pretty nice, huh? I thought it was festive without all the red-ribbons-and-pine that we traditionally see at Christmas. Something different.

At a nearby bulk foods store I picked up a felted skiing flamingo. Because everybody needs one! Don't ask me why the bulk foods store was selling flamingoes because I haven't a clue. As far as I could see they had no other felted items on hand.

Oh, and I impulsively got both a flu shot and a Covid booster. I happened to walk past a pharmacy that was advertising them, and thought, "Why not?" After all we're going to be traveling soon and I'll be visiting some older and vulnerable people in Florida, so it would be good to take precautions. I probably should have done it weeks ago but I just didn't think that far ahead. Normally our school provides flu shots for staff and faculty but if we were offered one this year I missed it somehow, and the flu is going around.  My Covid arm is sore this morning -- the flu arm less so -- but otherwise I feel pretty normal.

I asked the pharmacist whether it was a good idea to get both shots at once. "It's recommended, actually," he said. OK then.

The rest of the day was filled with minor tasks. I trimmed some dead stuff out of the garden, raked some leaves and filled a yard waste bag. I watered all the houseplants. I cleaned and vacuumed.

And I edited this week's garden cam footage! The resulting video is very short. I had quite a few clips but most of them weren't very good. I'd returned the camera to the back of the garden, but I put it in a bad place -- too close to a pile of leaves, which reflected back so much light that everything beyond it was lost in darkness. Also, there's a very intrusive stick in the way -- in real life it looks like nothing, but on the camera it looks HUGE.

So, anyway, bad positioning aside, here's what we've got:

-- We start out with Pale Cat, who wanders around and then jumps the back wall. This is how all the animals get in and out of the garden, by jumping over the walls or fences.
-- At 00:23, we have a wary fox, followed by a couple more.
-- At 01:18, a squirrel is packing dry leaves into its mouth and running off with them. Building a nest, I guess?
-- At 01:48 we get a great view of a fox. I came out the back door and startled it lurking in some shrubbery. It ran to the back of the garden and stopped right in front of the camera, stared at me for a long while and then jumped over the fence.
-- At 02:08, another fox goes by, then wanders off behind the shed.

Yellow and Blue

See -- this really is the darkest time of the year. Almost all my pictures for the last couple of weeks, it seems, have been taken at night! (Or indoors.)

I took the one above at the beginning of December. I suspect that tree has a lot fewer leaves on it now.

And these people have a bright blue light on their porch. It reminds me of those '70s "black light" bulbs that would illuminate special psychedelic posters. Remember those? When I was a kid, my neighbors had a black light and I remember being told we couldn't look straight at it or it would blind us. Sounds like parental scaremongering but we believed it at the time.

Those neighbors, including my friend Theresa who died several weeks ago, always had the coolest stuff. Anything I learned about pop culture as a small child, I learned from them. They had transistor radios and we listened to "Seasons in the Sun" by Terry Jacks, and "Billy Don't Be a Hero" by Paper Lace, songs that were frightening because they were about dying which I could barely conceive of at the time. They had the Parker Brothers game "Masterpiece" which was about art, and which I then asked for (and got) for Christmas. My favorite character was "Bitsy" Rich Wong Dobrowski Keyes. They had stickers and toys and fun stuff and their house was utter chaos, while mine was cool and organized and somewhat dusty. I loved visiting them but I gotta admit I was always happy to get back to staid normalcy at the end of the day.

And here it is, a Saturday morning in 2025, fifty-one years later, and Theresa is dead and Becky is dead and I barely know where all that time went. How did it get to be the future?!

Can You Stand More Holiday Lights?

Yesterday after work I went back to check out the "selfie booth" on the St. John's Wood high street. I was right -- it does light up at night, and quite impressively too.

And as long as I was at it I checked out some other holiday lights in the neighborhood.

Here's the high street from the other end, showing the street lighting and the Christmas tree.

And here's nearby Eyre Court, a large apartment building that has a big ol' decorated tree in the front garden. The tree is a permanent feature. I wonder whose job it is to string up those lights every year? They must have a cherry-picker to get to the top!

I had another busy day yesterday, but I did at least have a chance to write back to the reader who sent me a letter. Hopefully I can get my response mailed to her today. I spent time with two classes in the Lower School, including one where a girl in first grade asked me to read a specific book to her, which was cute. (Usually I'm just the guy behind the desk and the teacher is the reader, but I was happy to comply!)

I also covered and/or put spine labels on about 40 new books, including this one:

I'm imagining the author on a camping trip with a young relative, and the kid making up those characters from what he sees in front of him. I didn't read it to get a sense of the action. Does someone build a new Cabin Head out of Tree Head? It looks like there's also a Bush Head, a Flower Head and a...Rock Head?

Dave and I started the show "Pluribus" last night on Apple. It seems very promising! It's by Vince Gilligan, the same guy behind "Breaking Bad," and it grabbed our attention right away. I'm also slowly watching "The House of Guinness" on Netflix. Dave isn't as impressed by that show so I have to watch it after he's fallen asleep. We finished "Down Cemetery Road," which I liked but I must confess I do not understand the title at all. It's supposedly taken from a Philip Larkin poem. Maybe I need to read the poem more closely.

Killing the Bishop

I got out yesterday for a bit of daylight by taking a walk at lunchtime. It left me with less time to respond to blog comments, but I felt better. I was feeling a bit airless after a whole morning of work, including an hour-long meeting designed to formulate our departmental statement of purpose, or something like that.

I am so ready for retirement.

I found the chessboard above behind the church in St. John's Wood, near the high street. A woman and her much older companion -- her mother, maybe? -- were walking in front of me, and the older woman impetuously stuck out her foot and kicked over the bishop. The other woman set it right again. I thought it was a funny thing to do, but maybe she was trying to see how heavy the pieces are. (Not very.)

Something tells me the time to see this glittery, spangly feature is at night. I imagine people stand in there and take selfies. It's probably elaborately lit. Maybe I'll go back and check it out later.

And LOOK! THE BROKEN-DOWN BENCH IS GONE! It's only been seven months, and after the addition and subtraction of various combinations of warning cones and hazard tape. I was going to post something about it on Nextdoor, hopefully goading the authorities into action, when I found that they'd finally taken care of the problem.

I just joined Nextdoor, which serves as a sort of message board for local news and announcements. I've been reading mostly about missing cats, stolen cars and porch pirates. Yesterday I saw a vigorous debate about foxes and whether they're charming wildlife or hazardous pests. I'm not weighing in on that argument, but you all know I love my foxes.

This Way to Disillusionment

I pass this tastefully decorated house in St. John's Wood on my walk home from work. I'm sure I've photographed it in previous years because I remember the deer, but I can't find that picture now. I don't remember the big bow, so maybe that's new. (Or maybe my memory is questionable -- much more likely.)

Another killer of a day at work. The less said the better.

Here's our library Christmas tree, decorated by yours truly. It's a real tree -- you can see the needles on the floor. Not exactly a wildly innovative decorating job, but I'd call it thorough. I wish the colored lights were working. We do have some lights decorating the shelves behind it to the left, as you can see. I suppose in a fit of creative frenzy (which I am unlikely to have) I could wrap those around the tree, but it's hard with the ornaments already on.

My co-worker Staci had to go to the American embassy yesterday to deal with some passport stuff. When she got off the tube at the station, she found arrows directing pedestrians to various locations:

But wait -- what's that sticker on the embassy arrow?

When Staci came back to the office she showed me her photo and we both had a good laugh, and she gave me permission to blog it. The Instagram account basically shows all the locations those stickers have been deployed. Many of Trump's erstwhile followers are beginning to feel this way, it seems. What happens when cults die?

Flat Quirks and a Mutant Camellia

The hideous camellia has a weird, sort of mutant knot of flowers hanging from one of its branches. This is not the time of year for the camellia to bloom. It has no other blossoms. I wonder what triggered these flowers to go for it at this dark, insectless time of year?

I had a crazy day at work yesterday. I had to cover a couple of stacks of new books -- it seemed like 100 volumes, but about 25 is probably a more reasonable estimate. Many of them were novels-in-verse that are going to be used for Middle School classes today, so there was no time to waste. Do you ever read novels-in-verse? In other words, works of fiction that are written in a poetic style but follow a plot? They're not my favorite thing but they're big right now, particularly among books for young people. The cynic in me thinks they're popular because in this era of fragmented attention spans they can be read rather quickly.

Anyway...I also had to inventory the books for those classes and put them on a spreadsheet (my favorite thing!) and today we'll have to manage checking them out. It will be slightly more complicated than checking out normal books but the reasons for that are uninteresting even to me so never mind.

Plus, of course, all my regular daily duties including lots of re-shelving. When I write it all out it doesn't sound like much. Am I being whiny? Maybe.

I also received an unexpected and thoughtful letter from a blog reader, responding to one of my recent posts. I was so surprised that this person took the trouble not only to write me, but to write three pages, print them out and snail-mail them. It shows their level of passion about the subject at hand. Never mind the details but I will write them back once I've had a chance to compose my thoughts.

The other night I was closing our bedroom drapes, as I always do, and clipping them closed with the clothespin that always dangles from one side. We've done this every night for more than a decade because otherwise the drapes gape open slightly. It made me laugh at the persistence of this silly problem, and I got to thinking about the other quirks of living where we do.

There's our bedroom door, which will not stand open unless propped by some object. We use a pot that I made in pottery class about a quarter-century ago. It fits perfectly into that little space between the carpet edge and the door and holds it just right.

And there's the door to "the hole," the closet underneath the stairs going up to the flat owned by the Russians. It sticks because of repeated paint jobs, and it has a ridiculously small knob -- so small that it's impossible to grip, making it impossible to open the door. So we keep a bread knife handy on an adjacent table, to trip the latch and get the door open.

There are other issues -- the bathroom door that won't fully close because it doesn't fit the frame, and won't fully open because there's a radiator in the way; the sink that's too small to be truly usable.

I suppose every house has little oddities like these -- too minor to repair, but not optimally functional?

Colorful Lights at Harvard and Yale

I noticed yesterday while wandering around the garden (between intermittent periods of rain) that the red hellebores are just beginning to bud. Signs of life in a mostly dormant period for plants!

I had another quiet day yesterday, thank goodness. I cleaned in the afternoon and spent the rest of the day mostly on the couch. I finished a good chunk of "Super Sad True Love Story," which I'm really enjoying. I've already mentioned how prescient this book is, envisioning the United States as an authoritarian dystopia -- where the only civilian job opportunities are in security, consumer credit, retail or media -- at war with Venezuela. Well, the dystopia has morphed into a civil conflict, with the government fighting its own people. It sounds dark, and it is, but weirdly the book is also funny.

One line really stood out for me. A Korean-American character writes to her friend: "This country is so stupid. Only spoiled white people could let something so good get so bad."

Dave, meanwhile, conducted the high school band's winter concert yesterday, so he was busy. I often don't attend the winter concert. I usually wait until the final concert of the school year in late spring.

Oh! We made our summer vacation plans for next year. Believe it or not -- and this will surely mark me as the senior citizen I am slowly becoming -- we are going on a cruise. We've booked a trip that takes us through the lake country of northern Italy and then down the Adriatic coast of the Balkans, around to Sicily and up the west coast of the "boot." Dave has never been to Italy and he loves the idea of a cruise, with his hotel room basically following him around. I chose South America a few years ago, so it's his turn. (I've been to Italy but I haven't seen the parts we're visiting, for the most part, so I'm excited too.)

I thought you might like another "holiday lights" video, this one from our neighborhood. Nothing as grand as what we saw in my earlier London lights video, but still nice, with music once again by the Vince Guaraldi Trio. Among other things, we see the colored doorway lights of Harvard and Yale Courts, the apartment buildings behind our flat, as well as "snow" paintings on the windows of the veterinary practice where we used to take Olga, and the Christmas tree on West End Green.