A Stiff Lower Lip

I took this photo on Monday while walking to Islington. That's St. Stephen's church in the foreground, with the dark bulk of the modern Royal Free Hospital rising behind it. St. Stephen's, which was built in 1869, is no longer an active church -- it was "made redundant" in 1977 and deconsecrated in 2002. It's a restored event space now and apparently quite beautiful inside, though I haven't seen it first-hand. More history is here.

I'm posting the picture because I had to be at the hospital yesterday for a biopsy of the rough spot on my lower lip. Now, usually I am very good at maintaining my calendar in my head and knowing when I have an appointment. But for some reason I misremembered both the date and time of this biopsy -- I thought it was the 14th, until Wednesday night, when I got a text from the hospital reminding me it was actually the next day.

And then, when I set out for what I thought was a 12:20 appointment, walking from my house, I checked that text and saw that the appointment was actually at 11:50 -- and it was already 11:45! Crikey! I literally ran all the way to the hospital -- a little over a mile away -- and I got there 11 minutes late. I was afraid they wouldn't see me, but I pleaded transportation problems and they fit me in.

Street art along the Regent's Canal, Monday

Let me just say, having a biopsy of the lip is no fun. As you can imagine, there are a lot of nerve endings in your lips. There's a reason that kissing is so popular.

First they gave me a numbing shot, and that hurt like heck until it took effect. Then I felt nothing and the biopsy itself was pretty smooth, until I felt blood dripping on my wrist, which gave me a bit of a shock! Eventually I emerged with a very swollen lip -- I felt like a bald Kardashian -- with a single stitch, which will apparently disintegrate on its own in about a week.

I had to zip back home -- but not so fast that I couldn't walk -- in order to meet Mrs. Russia and some roofers who were giving her an estimate for roof work. Fortunately I'm not really part of that process so I just let them in the back garden and then stayed indoors while they talked.

Here's the status of my slide-sorting project, which as you can see has taken over the dining room table. (At least the part not already taken over by orchids.) On the right are the slides I might want to scan, but probably about half of them will be discarded in a second round of sorting. The ones neatly stacked on the left are all rejects, which I'll just put in a box. And the loose pile in back is trash -- and that's where they're going. There's also a small pile just above the rejects, next to my slide viewer, of collectible stamps that were mixed in with the slides -- I'll just tuck them into my stamp collection.

The table lamp is there to give me an additional light source if needed. And the yellow boxes behind the lamp contain more slides that I haven't even looked at yet.

My new slide scanner -- actually a camera attachment that allows me to photograph the slides -- arrived yesterday, so assuming it fits my camera as expected and I can figure out how to make it work, I may have some slides to show you tomorrow.

Bailey is a bit under the weather. She didn't eat last night -- who knows why. The weather is much clearer today than it has been -- and cold! I brought some plants in because I thought we might get frost, though it actually only got down to 34º F (or 1º C) so not quite as cold as I feared. I still haven't covered the avocado. I don't think there's anything in the forecast yet that requires that much intervention.

Ball, Bike and Dog

This image of sailors didn't come from a slide, but it was included in that bag of stuff from the slide dealer. There's always a fair amount of detritus in these bags, including (in this case) several old photo negatives -- big things, measuring a couple of inches across. I'm not sure what kind of camera they're from, but they're not 35mm.

I set the negatives aside, thinking I'd scan them, and yesterday I tried. But the scanner doesn't have a source of light from the back, so the scans just looked like black squares. Not very useful. (I think I've made that mistake before with my own negatives, actually.)

So instead I hung them in the dining room window, backed by the white wintry sky, and took pictures of them with my Canon. I then put those pictures into Lightroom, turned them from negative to positive (which is easily done by flipping the tone curve) and adjusted the contrast. Et voila! Sailors!

Here are some more:

I think those are all the same boy, who is probably related to the guy on the beach with the kid on his back. They're good-quality pictures. Someone knew their way around a camera.

This bag of slides is also interesting because of the many formats I'm encountering.

Here's a sample. At the top right is a normal 35mm slide, the most common kind. Left of that is what I believe to be a 110 film slide, dated 1980. Apparently you could get slide film for both 110 and 126 cartridge cameras -- I never realized that. (There are some 126 slides in this bag as well -- they're square and not very good quality, just like 126 pictures on paper!)

Below that is a stereoscopic slide, designed to be viewed in a stereoscope for 3-D effect. (I would love to know what that looks like, but I'm not buying a stereoscope to find out!) Apparently they can be professionally scanned somehow, but I'll just scan one side and leave it at that. "Vivienne" is in black and white, wearing a sweater and admiring an amaryllis.

And finally, at lower right is one of the negatives from the photos above -- just so you can see how big they are.

Lots of weird stuff in photo world!

A Broken Ring

I spent yesterday morning going through my latest Big Bag O' Slides. I dumped them all out on the dining room table and I'm separating them into three piles. Those that are too dark, blurry, overexposed or damaged go into "Trash." Those that don't thrill me go into "Second Look," which means I'll go through them again more slowly -- some may eventually get scanned but most will simply be stored. And those that I immediately like go into "Winners," which means they're almost certain to be scanned, though on second look some will get bumped back down into storage for one reason or another.

Some of the "Winners" are actually multiple shots of the same thing. For example, I found a funny picture of a woman leaning backwards against the wind on a mountain or cliff top. I set it aside, but then as I sorted I came across two more of the same woman, each one getting closer to her. Obviously I won't scan all three of them. I'll pick the best and store the other two.

I always struggle with what to do when I come across a picture of, say, daffodils in a garden. It's not interesting enough to scan, and it says nothing about its time period -- daffodils now look just like daffodils then. I'm tempted to just throw such pictures away, but I somehow can't bring myself to do it -- so I usually just stick them in the storage pile. I have no idea what I'm going to do with the boxes and boxes of mundane slides I own that don't merit scanning.

And "mundane" is the word for this whole bag, I gotta say. I'm about halfway through and I've only seen two or three shots that have made me go "Wow!" I think the box had been somewhat picked through. There are loads of boring landscapes, and some pictures that I just can't explain -- ocean waves, for example, or dark foliage. ("Trash!")

I still haven't figured out how I'm going to do the actual scanning.

Anyway, that was the bulk of my morning. I took the dog out for a walk in the afternoon. Her incision from her surgery is almost completely healed.

Above is a little DIY project of which I am somewhat proud. Our flat came with this wooden towel ring in one of the bathrooms, and the ring broke. Fixing it wasn't as easy as it looks, because it hangs from a mount that doesn't unscrew from the wall or open up. (In fact I'm not sure how it was manufactured in the first place!) To fix it, I had to glue the ring together while it was hanging from the mount. It has taken me months to get around to it, partly because until recently we didn't have the proper glue. I finally bought some Gorilla Glue and over the weekend I added glue to the broken ends of the ring, slipped half through the mount and attached the other half from below, and held the pieces together for about a minute while they set. Then I put rubber bands around it to hold the two pieces of the ring together for 48 hours or so. Thank GOD that's done now. You can see the seams in the wood ring but I don't care.

The dog is now doing her frantic rolling-around-in-the-blankets morning routine, which means it's time for her walk!

Autumnal Ramble With Ghost Family

I was gone almost all day yesterday on a long, London adventure.

I was supposed to meet our friend Gordon for a pub lunch at 12:30. The meeting was in Islington, and I thought I'd walk there -- a couple of miles. So after Bailey left for her walk with Josh at 9:30, I set out with my camera for a leisurely autumn photo ramble.

As you can see above, there's still a lot of color out there. I walked down through Camden Town and along the canal to Islington, which took a couple of hours, including a stop for coffee in Belsize Park and a stop at the Camden Market where I bought...

...another big bag of old photo slides! I'll have fun going through these over the next couple of weeks. I need to order a new slide attachment for my camera so I can digitize them. The one I have fits my old Canon -- the one stolen in Italy -- but not the new camera. I'll look into that this week.

I passed the Sir Richard Steele pub, which has a new sign. At least the poor guy now has some clothes!

I also passed lots of autumnal scenery. It's a beautiful time of year, even on a gray, foggy morning.

I got to lunch with plenty of time to spare and Gordon and I spent a couple of hours chatting. Dave and I used to work with him at school until he retired a few years ago, so among other things, we compared notes on retirement. He reminded me that I'm now eligible for an over-60 travel card that allows me to travel free on the tube and London-area trains! I completely forgot that this was a thing, but you can bet I'll be applying for that ASAP.

I did not walk back -- instead I took the overground, which deposited me practically back at my doorstep.

Buried in my bag of slides I found this tattered remnant of an old photo. I imagine AI could mend this if I knew where to upload it and what prompts to give. Another project for another day, maybe -- though I also like the ghostly images of these long-lost people peering out of the creases. There are some names written on the back, but I have no idea if they're the people in the photo. The only one I can make out is Mrs. J. Watts.

Almost lost to oblivion!

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Addendum: Here's Chat GPT's restoration of the family photo. It did a good job with the woman and the boy, but the girl looks completely different:

The Bromiges' Neighbors

This is one of the charity shops on our high street. Somehow their front door got broken, and for a while there's been a plain piece of plywood covering up the gap. But I noticed yesterday that someone's given the wood a cheerful paint job. ("Save Teenhood is a campaign being run by the charity to improve the experiences of teenagers in Britain, said to be the "unhappiest in Europe.")

Bailey and I found more freshly fallen leaves on our morning walk...

...and in the afternoon we went to the cemetery, where she drank from a puddle of rainwater in the base of a headstone (not sure where the stone itself went), rolled wildly in the grass and found the remains of a skinned football that she brutalized as if it were prey. It was entertaining to watch. Just the other day, I was telling Dave that Bailey didn't seem as excited about footballs as Olga used to be -- maybe she heard me and wanted to prove me wrong.

(Don't worry -- she didn't ingest any of the stringy bits, and I took it away from her after making the video.)

Here's one of the headstones in the cemetery, for William G. (died 1939) and Ada H. Fraser (1963). It's a modest grave marker, interesting only because it's now in the middle of a footpath. In fact it's very close to the grave of the Bromiges, which I've blogged before.

I can't quite remember if this path existed before Covid, but it certainly became more worn during the pandemic. The cemetery got a lot of use during that period, and around that time some paths were cleared around the perimeter in the rear section. Those are the paths I almost always walk with the dog, through the woods, rather than the paved roads in the center. (The front half of the cemetery is not as woodsy so there we use the pavements.)

Here are some other interesting graves. This is the marker of Elizabeth and John Creemer (died 1881 and 1894, respectively). The figure on the top looks like she's giving the Black Power salute ("Power to the People!") but I think she's perhaps meant to be holding something aloft -- a lantern, lighting the way? Just a guess.

This is a relatively modern grave for someone who died in 1998, just after his 16th birthday. It caught my eye because of the guitar, recently left behind with a note: "Happy 44th birthday, me old mate. You're still truly missed. Love from all the Crayford boys."

And here's a headstone for Charles Henry Webster Millar, a tenor who performed in the early 20th Century under the stage name Webster Millar. His son was also a famous singer. Both the quote at the top of the stone and the musical lyric come from Longfellow's poem "Hiawatha," the basis for a trilogy of cantatas written by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and perhaps performed by Millar. Apparently it was a popular work in that time period, performed regularly at Royal Albert Hall with a cast of hundreds.

You can learn a lot, traipsing around the cemetery with a demented dog.

Pseudo-Military Squirrel Hunting

Remember those brilliant yellow trees on a neighboring street that I showed you less than two weeks ago? Well, this is what they look like now. As you can see, we're getting foggy mornings lately, too. A very November-ish scene.

I kept myself busy yesterday caring for all the houseplants. I took the variegated rubber tree from our bedroom outside and gave it a bath -- it has thrips, I think, and it's struggling a bit. So I wiped every leaf with a dish-soap solution and then gave the whole thing a rinse. I also sprayed down the jade plant, which has persistent mealybugs. This is just a fact of life around here -- one plant or another always has some kind of bug on it, and I just try to keep them tamped down as best I can so they don't go crazy.

In the afternoon I took Bailey to Hampstead Heath. As you can see, she was hunting squirrels in the treetops even before we got there.

That's her new harness. It's a sort of military-looking thing with the brand name One Tigris, which certainly makes me think of Iraq. But it's great for her because it's very secure and has three straps, as opposed to her other one which has two.

I like it, even though she looks like a dog that Pete Hegseth might own.

We found this beautiful Amanita mushroom. I always thought these were poisonous, but Wikipedia says they can be ingested with the proper preparation and can even have psychoactive properties. Darn, a missed opportunity! (Only joking. There's no way in heck I would eat that under any circumstances.)

Bailey loves the woods and goes nuts for the squirrels. A woman walked past as she was barking madly at the treetops and said to Bailey, "You're not going to talk them into coming down!" Which reminded me of the guy who joked about Olga "barking them down" years ago. Maybe this is a common joke.

Last night we watched "Below" with Josh Hartnett, a TV series we recently started. It's about a fishing village in Newfoundland being terrorized by a giant squid and it's better than you might think, given that description. We've also started a show on ITV called "Trigger Point" about a bomb squad, and I'm enjoying that because it's filmed partly in our corner of Northwest London -- I've seen familiar landmarks like the South Kilburn Estate and a mosque up in Willesden Green. Neither of these are new shows and they both have multiple seasons, so maybe you've seen them already. We're a little slow on the uptake around here!

Fireworks

Bailey and I discovered this mural yesterday, tucked into a corner of a housing estate near Kilburn. It's kind of cool but also kind of creepy. Purple, mottled skin is a little off-putting, not to mention the blue eyeballs, though that's probably supposed to be eye shadow. The whole thing is very "RuPaul's Drag Race."

I worked more in the garden yesterday morning, raking up debris from our tree-pruning experience last month. It's remarkable how many stray sticks and branches are still out there. I'm not a super-tidy gardener but I don't want too much mess. I filled two yard-waste bags, and we already had an extra one full from last week, so we now have our quota -- after they're collected on Tuesday I can do more. I wish I could just rake it all into a big pile and light it on fire like we used to do in Florida, but I'm sure that must be illegal here. (It's unthinkable in any case.)

Many of our neighbors still have their jack-o-lanterns out. This one is pretty amusing -- and quite meticulously carved. I wondered if they'd made this up on their own, but no -- it's a Disney-sanctioned pattern, known as the "Cheshire Cat." Still, they did a good job! Looks like they messed up the right eyebrow, but that's minor.

Considering I didn't even attempt a pumpkin, and haven't for years, I can hardly be critical. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, or something like that.

Last night we got a surprise when a barrage of fireworks began going off across the street. I think they were associated with one of the athletic clubs -- there's a tennis club and a cricket club over there. Probably if I were better plugged in to social media I'd know whose they were. Anyway, I went out in the garden to try to see them (see video) but Mrs. Kravitz's house was in the way, so then I stepped out onto the front porch and got a better view. These were much more intense than anything we experienced the night before, but once again, Bailey didn't seem put off. She barked, but she wasn't fearful.

I see from my right-wing "news" source that some extremists are already peddling the fiction that the American election was stolen. They're trying to cast doubt on the numbers -- for example, they ask how so many more Texans could have voted for Talarico than for Kamala Harris in 2024. (Here's an explainer from a legitimate newspaper.) It doesn't seem inconceivable to me that voters might like Talarico more than Harris; also, a different mix of voters shows up from one election to another. They're also questioning why all the statewide California races broke roughly 53-to-46 percent in favor of Democrats.

So in other words, if results aren't consistent, people must have cheated. But also, if results are consistent, people must have cheated!

Honestly, I shouldn't even be amplifying their absurd claims. Democrats were highly motivated to turn out in these midterms, and Republicans weren't.

And now we have Susie Wiles out (because she's a woman and thus expendable in Trump's White House) and the awful Stephen Miller being elevated. Clearly Trump did not absorb the message of the voters.