Ducklings and Slides

I spent most of yesterday morning reading about the secret lives of sunflowers -- which honestly aren't all that interesting. I'm in a portion of the book focused on their hybridization and modification as an agricultural crop, and I'm less personally concerned about sunflowers agriculturally than aesthetically. There were some interesting factoids -- for example, the International Sunflower Association bestows an award named for Soviet scientist V.S. Pustovoit, who is apparently considered the granddaddy of modern sunflower breeding. Probably too obscure to turn up on a pub quiz, but still, who knew?! Anyway, I've churned through all that now and I think I have just one more chapter to go.

After a simple lunch I decided to take a couple of bags of stuff to the local charity shop, and then head out for a long walk. I grabbed my stepmother's camera and walked down to St. John's Wood, where I picked up the Regent's Canal at Lisson Grove.

The canal in that area is lined with narrow boats that, as far as I can tell, are more or less permanently moored. The towpath is lined with potted plants, cafe tables, benches and other furnishings that show it functions as a patio for those living on the boats.

It's a beautiful little secret gem of an area, where I haven't walked in years. Past the boat moorings, the canal passes beneath some railroad tracks and a major road before running through Regent's Park, past some stately mansions with wide, sloping lawns running down to the water.

From there it connects to the boat basin where the floating Chinese restaurant is anchored, and then makes a sharp turn eastward toward Camden Market.

I passed this mother duck with 13 tiny ducklings (!) trailing behind her. I'm impressed by how well they keep up with Mom. As I began making this video, a mob of European high-school students descended some stairs from the street above onto the towpath, which is why I got jostled and why it's so noisy. They were all exclaiming over the ducks.

Here's the scene near Camden Market. You can see all the kids on the towpath ahead of me. I saw a surprising number of kids out and about yesterday. Don't people have school? This coming Monday is a bank holiday, but as far as I know yesterday was a regular old school day.

At Camden Market I went to check out the booth of the dealer who sold me Joan Tubbs' photo slides a couple of summers ago. Sure enough, he had another box of slides, and many of them seem to be more of Joan's work. I knew I didn't have them all -- in fact, I got a note on Flickr last July from a university art student who also bought some of Tubbs' slides in Camden, so I knew there were more out there. Anyway, the guy sold me the whole box for £20. He said he has tens of thousands of slides from multiple sources and if I come back next week he'll have more available. I may well do that, because I am insane.

I brought them all home (stopping along the way in Belsize Park for coffee, because by then my feet were complaining). I've only been through about a quarter of them, but I've already found some photo gems so I will have another post of rescued slides coming up soon -- after I get everything sorted. I'm going to look into getting some equipment to scan them myself. The big expense is always the scanning, not the actual slides, so if I can avoid that it will be worth it.

Ironic that I brought home this big bag of slides after taking two boxes to a charity shop. Stuff out, stuff in. That's the way of life, right? At least slides are compact and easy to store.

Seedling update: One zinnia down, courtesy of a guilty-looking slug, found beneath an adjacent rock. Otherwise, everything is still hanging in there, and we even got a smattering of rain last night and this morning!

The Foxes Get Chinese Takeaway

We have one bluebell in our garden that isn't blue. It's a pinkbell. I know bluebells sometimes have color variations but this is a first for our garden, as far as I can remember.

I feel like I was busy as heck yesterday but when I told Dave's parents that on their regular weekly video-call, his mom said, "Oh, what did you do?" And I couldn't name anything that sounded very impressive! So I'm not sure where the time goes, but it does.

For one thing, I got my seedlings planted out, and that's a bigger deal than it sounds. There are only four or five of each type, but still, in our crowded garden, finding them a home was a challenge!

I put the cosmos and one zinnia in the long terra cotta planter that held the rescued primulas. (I saved the primulas too -- just moved them to a different pot.) Don't you love my ornamental rockwork? I know it looks like plant prison, but it's meant to keep the squirrels from digging up the seedlings.

Here's one of the sunflowers, complete with a copper slug ring (not very effective) to protect it. It's not great that our weather has been so dry, but at least it keeps down the slugs and snails.

And here are two little zinnias, with more pot shards to keep the squirrels at bay.

I am somewhat pessimistic about how well these tiny things will survive in our jungle of a garden, but at some point the plants just have to manage or not. I have one sunflower and one zinnia in some big pots at the side of the house, and those are the ones I consider our "insurance" if everything out in the main garden gets eaten -- though the squirrels can attack those pots too. I also have lots more unplanted seeds so I can always go another round if these die.

And what else did I do? Well, some routine stuff, like laundry and vacuuming and indoor plant maintenance.

Oh, and I compiled the week's video from the garden wildlife cam. Is it possible to have too much fox footage? If so, we may have it this week. At the beginning, I put out some mediocre leftover meat from a Chinese meal Dave and I ordered. The young fox came two minutes later and eventually, cautiously ate it, and then hung around for another 20 minutes or so, eating and then checking back to make sure nothing was left behind. So there's a lot of footage of him/her hanging around. (Dave has named this fox "Sharpie," because the tip of his tail is black. I think it's the same fox I saw atop the fence a few days back.)
-- In the midst of all that, at 2:54, Sharpie comes right up to the camera and gives it a sniff!
-- At 4:06, a few hours later, Crooked Tail comes and investigates the meat, but it's all gone.
-- At 4:53, we see another fox with a distinctly white-tipped tail. Q-Tip, maybe?
-- At 5:03, a pair of pigeons court each other.
-- At 5:24, the next night, I put down the rest of the Chinese meat. This time, Crooked Tail gets it, then comes back to make sure it's all gone.
-- At 6:15, I moved the camera to the back of the garden and aimed it outward, but all the footage I got was wind. I think I had it aimed too high. Nice wind video, though.
-- At 6:24, some pretty good close-up footage of a fox in the daytime, brushing right past the camera.
-- At 6:34, the fox runs into the garden from the corner of the fence, where it normally jumps in and out. About eight minutes later, it leaves by the same route.

This week I have the camera set up to film that corner, so hopefully we can see more of the animals coming and going.

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).