Crystal Blue Persuasion

That was the sky on Friday. Amazing, right? In England, it's pretty unheard of to have a sky of unbroken blue with not a single cloud in sight. And the temperature was just right -- mid to high 60's F, perfect for walking without a jacket.

So that's what I did. I went to Hampstead Heath and had a long walk, listening to my podcasts.

I wanted to check out the azaleas in the Athlone House gardens, which are usually blooming like crazy around this time of year. But I was still a bit early. They were beginning to bloom but they weren't quite at full effect. I may go back.

This unusual yellow variety was open, though. This may be the only yellow azalea I know in London.

Meanwhile, the trees on the heath are sending out their new, pinkish leaves, which will darken to green as they mature. I believe those are beech trees.

It was a good walk and I was out for a couple of hours, a merciful escape from some of the noise happening here at home. Our neighbor (not Mrs. Kravitz; the one on the other side) is having work done on her house and/or back patio. She's had a crew out there banging, grinding and sawing -- and bantering loudly and endlessly over the sounds of the machinery -- for a couple of weeks now, and this is after a roof maintenance job that required a huge scaffold over the entire house. (Remember the guys having their picnic in the street?) I think there's been construction inside the house as well. She doesn't appear to be living there while all this is done; at least, I haven't seen her.

All told we've been listening to a couple of months of construction noise. Will it ever end? I guess I should be happy she's maintaining the place, but just once I'd like to live next to (or beneath) neighbors who weren't doing noisy renovations! There's a house across the street having a gigantic renovation done as well.

Anyway, yes, walking gets me away from that.

Just for kicks, here's a video I took on another recent walk, of pigeons congregating on West End Green. I was impressed by how many there were -- more than I typically see. West End Green is very close to our house, so I'm betting some of these birds are the same ones we see monopolizing our seed feeders.

I've toyed with the idea of buying one of those feeders that has a built-in video camera to get footage of the garden birds, but all the ones I've looked at feature easily accessible seed trays, and I just know I would get a million hours of pigeon videos.

Dave will be at school this afternoon for a band performance, and I'll be hanging out at home or possibly out and about. Our skies are not forecast to look like the top photo today; it's supposed to be cloudy and we might even get rain tomorrow, which would be a welcome development.

I'll stay in and read -- my current book is "Sunflowers: The Secret History" by Joe Pappalardo. It's something I found on the library shelf and I was intrigued, and I'm not sure why. But it's quite interesting, if not exactly riveting. Did you know that sunflowers are native to North America, but Russia has also claimed ancestral ownership of them? Even sunflowers are a tool in the Cold War!

Speaking of sunflowers, I need to get our own planted out, as well as my zinnias and cosmos seedlings. I'm a bit nervous about that because the squirrels have been brutalizing our potted plants with their digging -- and I know they'll do the same to any freshly planted bedding plants -- but they can't stay in seed trays forever. Survival of the fittest!

June's Pictures

I mentioned a couple of posts back that I inherited my stepmother's camera, which I've experimented with a bit. Well, yesterday, while going through the camera bag, I found a couple of memory cards. One had lots and lots of photos on it, so naturally, I tried looking through them.

I expected them to be from her extensive travels, and they were. But most of the files were corrupted. It seems the card itself was damaged or maybe just worn out. I wound up spending an hour or two combing through the digital wreckage to see what I could salvage.

In the end, I was able to download 210 pictures, some not worth keeping. Like many people, June took lots of pictures out the windows of moving vehicles, or mistakenly had the camera set for video, or was zoomed so far in that everything is pixillated like crazy. Turns out the camera she was using was a Nikon Coolpix B500, so not even the same camera I have now.

But anyway, here are some of the photos I saved. They may already exist somewhere in my stepmother's digital archives -- hopefully she was able to download the data card herself. But maybe not? Who knows.

The picture above was taken in July 2021 on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts.

This was a drumming demonstration in Japan in 2018. You can see June standing against the back wall in the middle. All these photos were taken on cruises -- she loved cruising.

This appears to be Norway -- there's an adjacent photo of a fjord. Google tells me it's a folkloric celebration of summer, and indeed this was right around the summer solstice. (We actually met up with June in Greenwich right after this cruise, before she flew home.)

This is a "whirling dervish" dancer in Egypt, I believe.

Another shot from Egypt, showing the temple at Karnak. (Dave and I went there ourselves the following year.)

I had to Google this because I didn't immediately recognize that skyline -- it's Dubai, where I've never been.

I believe this is in Hawaii -- some kind of traditional dance. (There are adjacent photos showing the landscape around Kilauea.) (Later correction: This is in Papua New Guinea.)

And finally, from July 2021, there are several pictures of the giant troll sculptures at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay. This one is known as "Søren." I vaguely remember June showing these to me sometime after her trip, so perhaps she was able to get the pictures off the card.

There are lots more, including some of June herself, and ultimately I'll put them in an album on Flickr. I found it really poignant to look through this collection of images, at least the fraction of them that I could save. She did have a lot of fun, and good for her.

Cozy Ladybug and Acrobatic Fox

Well, apparently all it took for us to get better weather was for me to complain about it on the blog. Yesterday was a dream of a day, sunny and comfortable. I opened all the windows and let the air flow through the house, and sat out on the back garden bench for an hour or two just watching the birds and bugs and taking photos.

The morning was chilly. That's when I found this little ladybug hunkered down inside an azalea blossom. That azalea is called "Pink Spider" and it's one that I got for free during the Covid lockdowns years ago, when one of the garden centers was giving its plants away. There appears to be a second azalea in the same pot, with solid pink blossoms. I guess they make a good shelter for ladybugs!

This was my main job for the day -- cleaning all the windows in the living room and bedroom. It took a couple of hours because we have a lot of freakin' windows, but the room looks much better. I only do this once a year or so and it makes a huge difference. I still have to do the front of the house -- the dining room and the window next to the front door. I'll get around to it eventually.

Dave stayed home yesterday because he wasn't feeling well, but he was either asleep in bed or in his chair wearing headphones much of the afternoon, so honestly it wasn't much different from having the house to myself.

As I sat on the bench in the afternoon this little blue tit was flitting around in the maple tree overhead, evidently eating bugs.

And when I took a close look at the tree's tiny flowers, I saw that they were indeed covered with little insects -- that winged one at the top got my attention first, but look at all the others too! Aphids, I think? You can even see glistening drops of tree sap at the bottom of the picture, center-right. Bug heaven!

And then this morning, as I sat down to write, this happened. A young fox appeared at our window, peering in at me over the top of the television. It had climbed up on a patio planter to get a view indoors. As I watched it jumped atop the fence between us and the neighbors, and walked across the thick ivy that covers the fence. I'm guessing it's hunting something up there -- bird nests, maybe? It eventually jumped down without catching anything, as far as I could tell. Wild Kingdom!

First Rose, and Chilly Plants

Here's the first rose to appear on our bushes this year, blooming well ahead of any of the others. I'm surprised it's produced a flower in these chilly temperatures -- it's 45º F out there now (7º C), and will hit a low of 40º F (4.5º C) on Saturday. This year seems quite reluctant to warm up! Or is it usually this cold in April and I've just forgotten? I tried to sit outside in the sun to read yesterday morning but it was just too brisk. (Today's daytime highs will be better, in the mid-60s F.)

I've started shuttling my flower seedlings in and out of the house so they can stay indoors overnight. They seem to be growing quite slowly and I think they may just need some nighttime warmth.

I also brought my rescued rubber tree back inside. The poor thing is still in a sulk. I repotted it and the root ball looked solid enough, but it has produced no new growth and has lost a few leaves. The stem (trunk?) is still green but it looks a bit wrinkled, as if it isn't absorbing water well. So who knows -- the roots may be dead. Again I think the outdoor cold was doing it no favors. We'll see if it does better in cozier indoor temperatures.

I thought about cutting the whole thing back to see if it will sprout anew, but as long as it has green leaves I'll wait on that.

Here's another rescue I found next to a neighbor's trash cans two days ago. It's a fiddle-leaf fig and it was dry as a bone, loose in its pot. Again, I repotted it and gave it a drink. It has a tiny green sprout at the top so there's hope. I need another fiddle-leaf fig about as badly as I need another rubber tree.

On the bright side, remember the orchid the Russians threw away last summer before they moved? I pulled it out of the trash and adopted it, and it is now rewarding us with flowers.

Also blooming are our geraniums, at least this variety. They were incredibly prolific last year and I've repotted them so hopefully we'll get another good showing. Once again I didn't trim any of our geraniums and some of the plants are looking a bit straggly. I just can't bring myself to prune them. I don't know why.

OK, enough plant news. What else have I been doing around here? Well, I spent yesterday morning reading and running errands, as usual, and then in the afternoon I took a long walk, partly so I could catch up on my podcasts. Now that I'm not walking to work every day I don't have that listening time in the morning and evening, so I have to reconfigure my routines.

I passed these interesting murals along a pedestrian path on my way up to the Clitterhouse Playing Fields -- sort of an oceanic horizon on the left and leopard skin on the right. Colorful!

I was out for about two hours and got lots of listening done. I suppose I could listen at home but it seems weird to just sit on the couch and listen to a podcast. To me, that's something I do when I'm out moving around.

I see Trump is now going after the Southern Poverty Law Center with his weaponized justice department. Maybe I should double my donation this year? Honestly, that man is just vengeance personified. He's like Richard Nixon with his "enemies list," but even worse. I wonder if my donations to the SPLC and other progressive groups have landed me on some roster of citizens-to-watch. I probably don't give enough for them to worry about me, but you never know. I may be stopped by ICE on my next visit to the USA!

I've started watching a series on Netflix called "Black Rabbit" with Jude Law and Jason Bateman. It came out last year and I never had a chance to screen it until now. I'm two episodes in and it seems pretty good, though dark. Dave didn't really take to it so I'm watching it on my own. We typically don't turn on the TV until the evening and I don't want to change that. When my dad retired he started watching "Guiding Light" but I don't think I'm ready to surrender my life to daytime television!

June's Camera

When I visited Florida in early March for my stepmother's memorial, my stepsister and brother-in-law gave me her camera, a Canon SX70 HS. It's a lightweight, easy-to-use point-and-shoot with a built-in zoom and some other features. As it turns out, the timing was good, because I'd been thinking about buying a so called "bridge camera" to have a lightweight alternative to my big DSLR.

Yesterday I took June's camera out for a trial run. I'd never used it before and I wanted to see what kind of pictures it would take. I walked to Gladstone Park, on the other side of Cricklewood, shooting images along the way.

The photo above I took just steps from our flat, on West End Green. That guy was putting some kind of coating on the bronze plaque that commemorates the planting of that tree in 1902 for the coronation of King Edward VII. He'd brush it on and then heat it with a blowtorch (hence the gas bottle next to him). I asked him about it, and he said it's called "patination" -- it restores the bronze coloring so the plaque doesn't entirely oxidize and become green.

I wanted to try the camera in various situations. This was my test to see how it handles close-ups. I saw this brick with an interesting manufacturer's mark, only belatedly realizing there's a little ladybird (ladybug) on the left-hand side!

I shot all these pictures on auto, so I wasn't experimenting too much with settings. There is a manual option so I could use that if I wanted. The camera has a fold-out screen on the back, so I could frame my shot using that or by holding it up to my eye. I tried both methods.

Look at those beautiful doors! Can you imagine how great they must look from the inside, with sun coming through that stained glass?

Again, the camera seems to handle close-ups well. Canon introduced this model in September 2018 so it's not very old, and it wasn't particularly cheap. (My stepmother, who traveled the world, would not have a cheap camera!)

It handles street photography pretty well, though there's a bit of lag between snapping the photo and being ready to take the next one. It's not as rapid-fire as my big Canon EOS 5D Mark III.

It does landscapes nicely too. Here's a wood in Gladstone Park full of blooming wild garlic, also known as ramsons, with some bluebells in the back.

On the way home, I stopped in at a Costa in Cricklewood and had coffee sitting in the window, looking out on this scene, which I shot with my phone:

Interesting that there are two "casinos" right across from each other! Always being ripped off by The Man. The phone picture is smaller than the camera shots, about 2 MB compared to 6.5 MB -- so June's camera does indeed appear to capture more information than a phone.*

WHOA! What is this?! I didn't take this picture, obviously, but it came along with the others when I downloaded the images. Then I remembered my brother-in-law saying he took the camera to Lettuce Lake Park in Tampa to try it out himself -- he still had the date stamp turned on, so you can see that photo was taken Feb. 28, a few weeks after June died. There were a few other odds and ends on the memory card as well.

My verdict is that I'm pretty pleased with the camera. I think it will serve me well when I don't want to carry my big DSLR, which weighs 3.5 pounds with my lightest lens (and I'm usually carrying a camera bag containing two other lenses as well, weighing several more pounds). This camera is light enough to put in a jacket pocket. What a relief!

*Addendum: Actually, this is a misleading comparison because the iPhone photos are saved as HEIC files, which are compressed image files meant for greater storage efficiency. When I export them as JPEGs they're similar in size to the camera photos (also JPEGs).

Wires, Glass Art and More Garden Footage

From my walk through Queen's Park on Friday

I decided my task for yesterday would be to tame the wires in the alcove by the front door -- the ones strewn like giant spaghetti noodles behind the rainbow unicorn. In late morning I went to the hardware store and bought more cable clips, and affixed the phone line (which carries our internet) around the perimeter of the wall. I cut off the coaxial cable, which does nothing functional -- I think it's a remnant of a very old, outdated cable TV installation. I coiled up the detached cable and put it in a cabinet in the bathroom that we never use.

And voila! The floor behind the unicorn is now clear and it looks so much better.

Hey, it's a small thing, but I consider it a step in the right direction.

Also, I took the plunge on planning a little trip for next month. My old friend Bill from New York recently moved to Vienna with his husband. I haven't seen him in years, so I'm going to fly there for a few days in mid-May. Woo hoo! I last went to Vienna in 2023, so not that long ago, but I liked it and I'm happy to go back, especially to see things from the perspective of someone who actually lives there. Plus I spent most of my days on that last visit in librarian training, and this will all be free time!

I took a closer look at the art glass vase that I got from my stepmother's house in March. I remember my dad buying this vase when he got his bachelor pad at the La Place Apartments in Tampa following my parents' divorce in 1974. I think he bought it at an art show. In fact my brother and I may have been with him at the time.

I wanted to try to figure out who made the vase. The signature looks like "J Buron / 74" and I couldn't find any glass artists online with that name. But there is a man named John Byron who signed his works in an identical style and made similar vases from that same time period. I think this is a Byron vase and the signature got slightly obscured when he leveled the base. I don't know anything else about Byron, such as where he worked or sold his creations, but I'll keep looking.

And finally, I downloaded the garden cam for another wildlife-watching extravaganza! Who needs David Attenborough, honestly?!

We start out with Tabby the cat sauntering past, followed 15 minutes later by a fox with a stick or bone in its mouth. I sure would love to know what they're carrying around out there. The fox makes a circuit of the garden and stops behind a pot of hostas to give itself a scratch.
-- At 0:36, a squirrel works its way perilously far out a branch on our Japanese maple. They always nibble bits of the maple as it's budding. I imagine the tree's sap is rising and the new growth tastes sweet? Just a guess.
-- At 0:51, we get a quick daytime glimpse of Pale Cat.
-- At 0:55, later that same afternoon, we get a bee buzzing past the camera with Pale Cat sitting magisterially atop the back garden wall, surveying his domain.
-- At 1:09, a squirrel hops down from the bench and toward the camera.
-- At 1:23, a curious cat comes right up to the camera for a sniff. It might be Pale Cat, but I can't quite tell because it's so close to the camera you can't see its markings.
-- At 1:33, we get a partial glimpse of another cat. I think it's Blackie.
-- At 1:38, we see a series of visits by foxes hours and/ or days apart.
-- At 2:14, I put down a fish skin for the foxes. One finds it about 20 minutes later and carries it farther back in the garden, eats it and then sniffs around looking for more.
-- At 3:25 a different fox (Crooked Tail) comes a couple of hours later, drawn by the scent of the fish skin, but it's long gone.
-- At 4:32, we see another squirrel prowling cautiously through the green alkanet, a common weed/wildflower with blue blossoms that the bees love.

You may notice that the perspective of the garden cam changes several times. I've been moving it around to see where I can get the best footage, and to change up the background so we're not always seeing the same thing. OK, it's not quite Attenborough.

A Fox, a Pig and a Ceilidh

This fox visited our garden yesterday evening, when it was still light enough for me to get a photo of it peering at me from behind the birdbath. I'm always happy when I catch a glimpse of the foxes in daylight so I can appreciate their coloring, and now that we have daylight so late in the day that's likely to happen more.

I spent most of the day reading "London Falling," which I finished. I powered through that book. It was so good -- a real page turner. It tells the true story of a London teenager who died in 2019 in a fall from the balcony of a luxury apartment on the Thames. Why he fell, and the circumstances surrounding his presence in the apartment and what might have happened there, are a mystery. It turned out he was pretending to be the son of a Russian oligarch and had become mixed up with some unsavory characters who wanted his nonexistent money -- and that's the barest of the bare bones of the story. The author wrote an article in The New Yorker about the case in 2024, which he then expanded into this book. An outstanding read! I sent it to school with Dave this morning, to donate it to the library.

It did make me marvel at the underground world of con-men, liars and thieves that surrounds us all every day -- particularly in a cosmopolitan, global financial city like London where people come from all over the world to invest their ill-gotten gains, real or imagined. It's enough to make a person a little paranoid.

On a happier note, I went to my first ceilidh yesterday. It's basically a Scottish dance party, similar to what we'd call square dancing in the USA. In fact I'm sure square dancing derives from these kinds of dances, or maybe vice versa -- one we danced yesterday was the Virginia Reel. The colonials have come back to haunt the motherland!

One of Dave's colleagues in the music department hosted this ceilidh (pronounced "kay-lee") for her birthday, in the gym of a school right around the corner. Dave insisted on the walk over that he wouldn't dance, but of course he wound up dancing twice, one of those times with me. It was fun to watch and I got to chat with some of his co-workers and even some kids from our school, who were there with their parents. I'm glad to be able to say I am no longer a ceilidh virgin.

No. There are no videos. At least not that I'm posting publicly.

On the way home we stopped into Waitrose to pick up some stuff for dinner and I found this item in the garden section. This little ceramic pig is stuffed with sheep's wool, and supposedly, hanging it in the garden gives the birds something to nest with. I bought it for £7 even though it seems a bit ridiculous. Who doesn't want to give their birds a cozy nest?! We'll see if any birds use it.

There's a sucker born every minute, as P.T. Barnum supposedly said. Or was it W.C. Fields? Someone like that.

In the evening I poured a glass of wine, using these glasses that Dave's parents and sister sent me for my retirement. They capture my mood pretty accurately!