The Uncaged Birds

Bailey and I found this street art on our walk yesterday afternoon. I'm not sure what it means. Obviously caged birds being released, but why does the cage have an English flag? Something about letting go of far-right nationalism?

We also encountered a gigantic tour bus trying to snake its way through the relatively narrow streets of our neighborhood. It was trying to round a corner from a side street onto our street, and it seemed to be having trouble making the turn. As I walked by, the driver opened his window and called out to me, "Can I go down this street?"

I said, "Well, the street's open, but I have no idea whether you'll be able to get that thing down it. I've never driven a bus before!"

He seemed unhappy with this answer, so he asked the guy walking behind me the same question. I didn't stick around for his response. Somehow he managed to get out of there because by the time the dog and I had circled the block the bus was gone.

So yes, I still walked Bailey in the morning and then I walked her again in the late afternoon, despite the fact that her dog-walker started yesterday and took her out for an hour. So she got three walks. The whole reason we're getting the dog walker is so I'll have more freedom to leave home and not be tied down by canine responsibilities, but so far I'm still trying to figure out how he fits into our daily schedule. She expects a walk when she first gets up, and I think she needs one in the afternoon, so who knows. My ideal would be to have the walker come in the afternoon, but apparently that's not an option. We'll make it work.

She had fun on her walk, if this video by her dog-walker, Josh, is any indication. She took to him right away and didn't show the slightest concern about leaving me behind -- unlike Olga, who used to put her tail between her legs whenever the dog-walker showed up, and never liked to leave home without Dave or me.

I also took down our inflatable mattress from one of the dark hidey-hole cabinets over our hallway and blew it up to make sure it still works. Dave's nephew and his girlfriend will be sleeping on it when they visit later this week, so we wanted to make sure it's functional, and it appears to be. We still have some work to do to get ready for their visit, mainly re-hanging the drapes in the dining room, which also serves as the guest room on the rare occasion that we have visitors, and moving some furniture to make room for the bed.

The last time anyone stayed with us was Dave's parents, I think, and that was back in 2018! Can that be right?!

New Bedspread

Yesterday was the last day of the Royal Photographic Society's street photography exhibit in Mayfair. I had a stewarding shift at the gallery, from its opening at 11:30 a.m. to its closing at 3 p.m. We had pretty steady attendance (about 35 people overall) including my pals Colin and Shannon from the school where I used to work. I put an announcement about the show on Facebook and, lo and behold, they came. There are a host of legitimate ills associated with social media, but it does work!

At the end of the afternoon I brought my mounted photo home, and I must say, I'm happy to put this show behind me. Now we have Dave's nephew and his girlfriend coming to stay with us for several days beginning Thursday, and then I'm off to Florida.

While wandering around Mayfair I came across this building, obviously an old tube station. I don't remember ever seeing it before. It's about midway between the Green Park and Hyde Park Corner stations, on Down Street. Apparently it was only open for tube service from 1907 to 1932, and then used as a government shelter during the Blitz. Nowadays it's open for occasional tours, and I might try to do one of those at some point. Sounds pretty cool, doesn't it?

I grabbed a quick lunch at Pret a Manger, where the utensils were so tightly packed into a container on the counter that they made intriguing patterns.

On the home front, Dave and I got a new bedspread. The old one, which had pale green, gray and blue stripes, was at least ten years old and falling apart. Now we have a much brighter one which we actually really like, even though, as I told Dave, it's sort of "Laura Ingalls Wilder goes to Bombay."

I finished "Jackass 3" last night, mainly because we rented it and by golly I was going to get my money's worth. It made me laugh, I must admit, but it made me cringe too, and a few of the stunts are indescribably vile. I think I've had enough of that for a while, and possibly for the rest of my life.

Lost or Damaged Balls and Stray Arachnids

While walking Bailey through the nearby housing estate yesterday morning, I noticed these stray footballs on the other side of a very high fence, as impenetrable as a barrier surrounding a prison. It's at least eight feet high with sharp metal at the top to prevent anyone from climbing over. I suppose if your football or basketball somehow winds up on the other side of that fence you just have to live with it, because there's no way to get it back. Of course, my mind immediately set about trying to figure out ways to defeat the system -- a long pole? Chewing gum?

Yesterday was another quiet day at home. I read a New Yorker, including a profile of Johnny Knoxville, the ringleader of the gang behind the "Jackass" films. Apparently there's a new one, which seems improbable to me given that Knoxville is practically my age and thus a little long in the tooth to be pulling Jackass stunts. But it made me think Dave might appreciate this franchise, because he loves juvenile humor and, basically, fart jokes.

Years ago I saw the first two Jackass movies and I thought they were pretty funny -- more so than I cared to admit. So last night we rented "Jackass 3," which I'd never seen, and even though it featured Dave-like humor (one gag involved a guy with a trumpet and the above-mentioned bodily function, which seemed written specifically for Dave), he did not like it at all. We turned it off halfway through. Oh well. I would have finished it, at least -- and might still if I have a spare hour over the next day or two.

It's the lowest of low culture, but hey -- I was inspired to watch it by The New Yorker! Doesn't that count for something? The intelligentsia have taken notice!

Here are the owls that guard our patio from their perch on the fence. I found them both in the cemetery years ago and they've hung there for ages, getting gradually more and more rusty. You can see how bedraggled our climbing hydrangea looks after the dry summer.

I walked the dog in the afternoon and I'm proud to say that once again, she didn't bark at any other dogs. She does this thing where she perks up, points her ears and stares, as if to signal "I SEE YOU and I will CUT YOU," but she's now less likely to let loose with a volley of barking. Some of you have suggested that's because she feels more relaxed and less threatened now, and I hope that's true.

It's so funny because she's the opposite with me and Dave -- warm and cuddly to the point of being annoying. She's in my lap all the time.

It's a gloomy morning here -- we may have had a bit of rain, I can't quite tell. I'm off to Mayfair later today for my last shift of stewarding at the RPS street photography exhibit. It's the last day of the show so hopefully we'll get some visitors. There's a 90 percent chance of rain for the day, so at least I'll be indoors.

Dave snapped this photo of a household visitor on Vivian Swift's watercolor portraits of Olga. Surprise! It is spider season, after all.

Black and Yellow

Here's an example of how a photographer sometimes depends on luck to get a shot. What caught my eye here was the bright yellow van, and how the yellow of the license plates on the motorcycles echoed the same color. So I began taking pictures, and as I did so, this woman in a black sweater walked by, and that black car passed simultaneously on the street. Voila! It was all very fortunate -- a composition in yellow and black. If there'd been a passerby in a blue shirt across the street, or a green car passing instead, the shot wouldn't have worked.

You're getting this picture from my walk around Mayfair on Thursday because I took only one picture yesterday, and it was no great shakes. I spent the day at home, mostly on the computer, catching up on blog comments and reading. I feel like I was so busy all day, but then Dave came home in the afternoon and asked what I'd been up to, and I had trouble answering. "Laundry?" I said lamely. It's amazing how you can blow a whole day doing inconsequential stuff that doesn't even merit discussion.

Here's yesterday's one picture, taken on our morning dog walk, in case you're curious:

I just got the funniest e-mail from Mrs. Russia, our former upstairs neighbor: "Sorry to bother you. A KFC order was delivered to the wrong address by mistake and has been left outside the door. Would you mind throwing it away, please, before the foxes get to it? Thank you so much, and sorry for the inconvenience."

She sent it at 9:30 p.m. last night, and I didn't get it until just now, so of course I had visions of fried chicken strewn all over the front steps. But there's nothing there, so I suppose her tenants found it. Poor foxes lost out!

We have successfully arranged for a dog-walker for Bailey, which I'm happy about. I've been concerned about how she'd fare during my absence in Florida later this month, with Dave at work all day. The walker will take her to Hampstead Heath every morning, which will be a treat for her -- and hopefully he can also help train her how to behave better on a leash and in the presence of other dogs. (Though she has improved a lot already. I walked her to the cemetery yesterday and she didn't bark once at another dog -- and we saw several!)

Random graffiti from my walks last week.

I'm just about to start a new book -- Ike Eisenmann's memoir about being a child actor for Disney. Eisenmann was an omnipresent film star in the '70s, appearing in multiple Disney movies like "Escape to Witch Mountain," as well as ABC Afterschool Specials and various TV shows (and eventually a "Star Trek" movie). He was an early and innocent crush for gay boys of my generation, and co-starred with other tween heartthrobs of the time like Lance Kerwin. I'm intrigued to read this book and see what stardom looked like to him, from inside the Disney machine.

The Gallery

Blogger photo uploads seem to be working again, which is a relief. I came across this building yesterday near Bond Street -- it's a restaurant called Drunch, and I have no idea why it's festooned with teddy bears. I guess because people then mention it on their blogs! (Or, more likely, Instagram.)

Why was I in Mayfair? Well, the street photography exhibit that I entered and for which I judged photos, sponsored by the Royal Photographic Society, is on display this week in a gallery there.

And here it is, or about a third of it anyway. My photo is on the right-hand wall, the top picture of a set of two to the right of the corner. (In other words, just two pictures to the left of that nearest man.) It's this photo, in case I never mentioned which one was chosen. I have two others on a rolling digital display in the rear gallery.

I was there for about three and a half hours in the middle of the day, "stewarding" the exhibit, which basically just means sitting at that little table and answering questions about the photos and the RPS. We did get several visitors, so that was encouraging. I have another stewarding shift on Sunday.

And then last night was the opening party, so I was back and packed into that gallery with seemingly about 100 other people that I barely knew, having wine and meeting and greeting. I kind of dreaded that event, to be honest, but as my mother said whenever I shied away from any social outing, "You just have to do these things." It turned out to be pretty fun -- I stayed for about an hour, I think, and then beat a retreat home. Dave woke up yesterday with uveitis, an eye problem that required medical attention, so he didn't accompany me as planned.

The after-work pub crowds were out in Shepherd Market, near the gallery. Westminster has been considering rules that would regulate "vertical drinking" like this, but I'm not sure where those proposals stand. The idea raised an uproar because standing outside a pub on a summer night is practically a British social requirement -- and it's a really nice way to have a beer. Killjoys!

You're probably wondering how Bailey's spaying went. Well, it didn't. She's still having her "false pregnancy," so we've delayed it another three weeks. The vet said she doesn't want to wait too long because Bailey might go into heat again, God forbid. I'm going to take her in on Oct. 6. This dog is exhausting!

Last night Dave and I rented a fascinating documentary on Amazon, "32 Frames: A 9/11 Mystery," about the discovery of a camera in the rubble of the World Trade Center and the effort to identify the photographer based on the salvaged images. Each picture offers clues, and it's a good photographic mystery. It was mentioned in this article in The New York Times, which is worth reading if you haven't already had too much 9/11 news. (I was living in New York on 9/11 and I've blogged about those experiences here, here and here.)

Out and About in Chelsea

Blogger is on the fritz again today. It seems many people are unable to load photos, given what I'm seeing in the community forums. I couldn't load them myself in the usual way, so I'm uploading them to Flickr and then embedding them here, which seems to be working. Hopefully you all can see them too.

Blogger seems creakier and creakier these days! Or maybe we're just having a run of bad luck.

I was out and about in Chelsea yesterday, which is why I was largely absent from the blogosphere. I met up with my friend Sally for lunch and a visit to the Saatchi Gallery, where the Royal Photographic Society mounted its International Photography Exhibition. The show is just about to end, so I wanted to be sure to see it this week.

Before my rendezvous with Sally in Sloane Square, I wandered from Victoria through Chelsea taking pictures. It was my first real photo walk with the new camera, and it felt good to experiment with that. Above are the rail yards leading to Victoria Station with Battersea Power Station (actually on the other side of the Thames, invisible from this perspective) in the background.

It was a bright, sunny morning, perfect for good shadows and colors. I inadvertently had my camera set to take JPGs rather than RAW images, and I much prefer RAW, which are higher resolution, so I need to change that. This camera seems quite fiddly with all of its controls -- it's really easy to hit a button and change something without meaning to, in the process of taking it in and out of the bag, for example. There's a "lock" function to prevent that and I need to use it more.

Anyway, all this will become clearer the more pictures I take.

The exhibit was interesting. My only complaint is that some of the photos on display are clearly part of a series, but the series itself wasn't shown -- so we were seeing just part of the whole. I guess that's always a challenge with gallery shows, where wall space is limited.

We had lunch at Ottolenghi, and then coffee at a cafe on nearby Duke of York Square. The guy above was painting en plein air in Sloane Square.

I was worried how Bailey would cope with my absence all day, but when I got home the house wasn't demolished. She was very excited to see me when I came in the door. But I was greeted with a bizarre mystery -- there was a dead bird, a little blue tit, on the floor of our bedroom! I can only imagine that it flew into the house through one of the windows, which we leave cracked open for ventilation, and then Bailey killed it. It's just bad luck that it came inside on a day when I wasn't home to free it right away. We haven't had a bird in the house in years so this was truly a freak thing, unless Bailey somehow drew it inside with her supernatural powers. Is she a canine Lorelei, luring not fishermen but birds to their death?

In the evening I called my stepmother's bank and pleaded my case regarding their most recent demands. To my surprise, the woman on the phone agreed with me that the date of the apostilles is not an issue. She suggested that the "business office" was having trouble keeping track of all the relevant documents because of the way they'd been scanned as a single batch by the notary, and she suggested re-scanning them into individual packets, one for each account. So I did that -- even though I had to buy a fancier version of Adobe Acrobat to make it work -- and I resubmitted everything. Fingers crossed this puts an end to their shenanigans, but I'm not holding my breath.

Bailey is getting spayed today, assuming her false pregnancy has subsided. We shall see.

Rain and an Old Movie Memory

I take back all my skepticism about yesterday's rain. It turned out to be exactly what we needed -- a full day of steady, soaking drizzle -- almost 16 mm worth, according to our local weather site. It was by far the rainiest day we've had in months. I couldn't even begin to think about going outside until about mid-afternoon, when I spotted this discarded tin while walking Bailey. (I did not try to salvage it!)

Here's where Bailey spent most of her day -- perched on the end of the couch, where she can easily see outside and be entertained (or tormented) by passing wildlife.

I caught up on answering blog comments and read a New Yorker. And I wrestled with yet more demands from my stepmother's bank. They're now arguing that the notary seals and the apostilles have to have the same date, so they want me to go back and re-sign and re-notarize all the beneficiary forms I've already submitted. I'm going to call them today because a) this is bullshit, and even a simple Google search would tell them that a notary seal and an apostille don't need to be completed on the same day to be valid; and b) this imposes a hardship on me because I'd have to spend another £300 (about $400) on notaries, in order to inherit less than $2,000 -- my tiny share of her accounts. It's enough to make a person crazy. I really do believe they're acting in bad faith, and this is a disgraceful way to treat family members who have endured the death of a parent.

On a brighter note, I'm kicking around the idea of transcribing my childhood journals into a private blog -- not for anyone to read, but for me to be able to search when I want to remember something. I did this many years ago for my adult journals, and it helps me rapidly look up memories (like the encounter with Gloria Steinem I related recently). I'd have to edit them pretty heavily because they're full of gibberish and childhood in-jokes between me and my brother that no one else would understand, but it could be done. I took one volume down yesterday and read a few entries. Here's a sample, from when I was 13:

July 2, 1980

Last night I typed a card for the Andeker, which Dad drank on Monday. We also got ready to send off for the cans we need from that guy in Arkansas. We packed up the Fischer's Light and the 16-ounce Pabst Blue Ribbon and a letter telling him we wanted the Old German can and the Boh can. Boh is short for Bohemian, which is the can he's sending us. I also told him about our extra Puerto Rican cans and our extra Andeker. I told him to write back if he's interested. So maybe we'll get a reply! Jim also let me take home the Beer Can Bible to read.

I scoured that dingy bathtub today. What a pain! I never did get all the rust off. I got a lot of it off, though. At least it looks like a bathtub, and not a 16th-Century washtub!

We went to a movie with Mom tonight called "The Empire Strikes Back," which is a "Star Wars" sequel. I even saved my ticket stub! There was one creature in the movie which Mom really liked, named Yoda. He was a Muppet creation, and Frank Oz did the voice. (I knew there was a reason why he sounded like a cross between Fozzie Bear and Grover!) He really fools you, because he looks so real. All the Muppets do, and whenever I watch them, I keep forgetting that. I don't think I'll ever get the fact that Kermit the Frog isn't real through my thick skull. (Good grief, I must really be tired. I just insulted myself!)

A few essential notes, in order for that to make sense:
-- My stepbrother and I, at the time, collected beer cans. We would have our parents buy any unusual beer we spotted in a store, which my dad then wound up drinking before giving us the can. We traded these cans with people around the country as members of the Beer Can Collectors of America (BCCA), and we typed up notecards noting the source, condition and brewery of every can. It may seem like needless work but it taught me to type!

-- The well water where I grew up was heavy in iron and would routinely stain our fixtures, appliances and dishes rust-red.
-- Of course I knew the Muppets weren't real, but my point was that they seem very animated!

And here's the ticket stub for "The Empire Strikes Back." You gotta love the fact that going to the movies in 1980 cost two dollars!